What Gets Sacrificed in a Nuclear Energy Shutdown

Writer Mark Gunther over at the Energy Collective talks about his hesitation to renew his Greenpeace membership:

If Greenpeace manages to persuade the US or other governments to "eliminate nuclear power"- that's what the headline [of the renewal letter] says - the risk of catastrophic climate change will grow much worse. Climate activists [and]environmentalists who  support nuclear power include Stewart Brand (in his excellent book Whole Earth Discipline), ex-DOE chief Steven Chu, contrarians Michael Shellenberger and Ted Norhaus (see Going Green? Then Go Nuclear), the former British prime minister Tony Blair, economist Jeffrey Sachs and ex-NASA scientist James Hansen.

You could throw in current DOE Secretary Ernest Moniz (“Moniz is an advocate for a low-carbon future and has, in a variety of forums, promoted the use of nuclear energy to get there.” – from the National Journal) and President Barack Obama if you want.

Gunther also brings up our old bête noir Germany and points to an excellent article in Der Spiegel about the destruction being wrought in the name of renewable energy. This stood out:

Although this conflict touches all political parties, none is more affected than the Greens. Since the party's founding in 1980, it has championed a nuclear phase out and fought for clean energy. But now that this phase out is underway, the Greens are realizing a large part of their dream -- the utopian idea of a society operating on "good" power -- is vanishing into thin air. Green energy, they have found, comes at an enormous cost. And the environment will also pay a price if things keep going as they have been.

The working cliché here is “Be careful what you wish for.” Why? We’ve talked about the land needs of wind and solar power, but biomass also has requirements.

Martin Kaiser, a forest expert with Greenpeace, gets up on a thick stump and points in a circle. "Mighty, old beech trees used to stand all over here," he says. Now the branches of the felled giants lie in large piles on the ground. Here and there, lone bare-branch survivors project into the sky.

Kaiser says this is "a climate-policy disaster" and estimates that this clear-cutting alone will release more than 1,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Kaiser and Greenpeace are none-too-happy about this outcome, but all those mighty beech trees have been repurposed to facilitate clean renewable energy,right? (Honestly, this consequence had not occurred to me – but it is potentially worse than the land mass required for solar and wind – destroying both an effective counter to carbon dioxide and a country’s natural legacy.) Germany doesn’t appear to be taking much care in how it gets to where it wants to go. Let’s hope it finds the right balance as it proceeds.

The Der Spiegel article is worth a careful read – it describes a situation like that in the Luis Bunuel faux-documentary Land Without Bread, in which efforts by the Spanish government to help the people of an impoverished region of the country only makes their lives far, far worse. (Probably, much of what the old surrealist depicts in the movie is made up, but his point is valid – as Germany is showing.)

But back to Mark Gunther. Does he renew with Greenpeace? – well, it’s only fair to go over to the Energy Collective and find out yourself. But his conclusion is valid whatever he decides:

We don't need an all-of-the-above energy strategy--that's folly, if it includes burning lots of fossil fuels--but we do need an all-of-the-above low carbon energy strategy, led by a strong commitment to renewables and energy efficiency, but including nuclear and some natural gas (ideally with carbon capture) to provide affordable baseload power. [bold in original]

I might add that fossil fuels represent a major industry with many workers – a Germany-like move here would devastate the economy of several states and pitch a lot of folks onto the street – but Gunther has the right idea withal.

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Patrick Moore’s Economic Justice

Patrick Moore, ex-Greenpeace, sees in nuclear energy an interesting argument for what he terms “environmental justice,” which is true enough, and economic justice, used in the headline, works as well:

African-American and Hispanic advocacy groups have historically been focused on civil rights, but they're "morphing into economic development," Moore said, and looking at energy policy for the first time.
Unlike many other big industrial facilities, he noted, polls show nuclear power plants have increasing popular support the closer people live to them. Nuclear plants are "wealth creating machines," Moore said, with no pollution, better roads and schools financed by the plants' property taxes, and large payrolls.

Moore is right about this. Nuclear energy facilities are also often union shops, which offers a good path to the middle class and out of economic uncertainty. A city of industry can be a world of opportunity and nuclear energy plants have the added benefit of not turning communities into pollution laden sump holes. A cooling tower is not a smoke stack.

Moore told AOL Energy that he is reaching out to African-American and Hispanic business and labor groups, telling them that nuclear plants, in contrast to projects like coal plants, are long-term community assets.

I’m sure the coal industry might say a few words about that, but Moore has a point.

[N]uclear not only needs thousands of skilled workers when plants are built new but generations of skilled workers to keep the units running for 60 or more years.

Moore addresses other issues, too, including natural gas and small reactors – and his comments on these are interesting – but his comments on the economic value of nuclear plants seems particularly germane at this moment in time. Visit the Clean and Safe (CASE) Energy Coalition for more on his current activities.
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And Greenpeace? Constructive as always:

"A Greenpeace activist arrived with a motorized paraglider around 7:40 am (0540 GMT). He flew over the plant, threw a smoke bomb and landed inside, where he was detained," police near the Bugey plant in southeastern France told AFP.

See blog post below for more information on the paragliding story.


Hangliding over Le Bugey. The idea was to show a security breach, but it may well be the French decided not to kill a nitwit (or a regular joe, er, pierre who went drastically off course). In any event, he couldn’t have hurt the containment structure even if he had been explosives laden and blew up against it – something the plant workers also would have known. But zut alors! The workers would sure have a nasty job hosing off the structure afterward.

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Wanted: New Stunt Men for Greenpeace

The French arm of Greenpeace is probably searching for a few new recruits after two of its activists were arrested today by French authorities for paragliding onto the grounds of the Bugey nuclear energy facility and dropping a smoke bomb. The stunt is nothing more than a political ploy by the organization to expose what it calls, “gaps,” in nuclear plant security ahead of the French presidential election. However, plant owner EDF assures the public that no such security gaps exist and that the plant remained safe and secure despite today’s criminal activity:

Safety at the installation was never called into question. Safety measures put in place at the end of 2011 allowed the detection and immediate arrest of the intruder.

But, some people still wrongly believe that the criminal activity proves just how easily someone could intrude a nuclear plant and wreak havoc. To their false notions, I’d like to point out a few facts about nuclear plant security.

First, simply landing at a nuclear energy facility via a paraglider is about the same as watching a feather land on a bucket of water. Nuclear energy facilities are highly fortified structures with many built-in, redundant safety measures, making it nearly impossible to penetrate the reactor and cause a radiation release.

The reactor is protected by roughly 4 feet of steel-reinforced concrete with a thick steel liner and the reactor vessel is made of steel about 6 inches thick. The steel-reinforced concrete containment structures are designed to withstand the impact of natural disasters as well as airborne objects with a substantial force.

Research by the Electric Power Research Institute after 9/11 confirmed the latter part of these scenarios in a 2002 study on the impact of an unexpected jetliner attack. The study results found that the structures that house reactor fuel can adequately guard against a release of radiation in the event of a terrorist strike by a large, fully fueled Boeing 767-400. The state-of-the-art computer modeling techniques used in the study determined that the areas of the plant most vulnerable to radiation release—including used fuel storage pools or the nuclear reactor—could withstand the impact forces despite concrete crushing and bent steel on the containment structures.

NEI has a video that shows the different layers of protection in a reactor containment structure and also the impact to a jetliner if it were to strike one of these elaborate structures (around the 1:30-mark).

As you can see in the video, a jetliner that strikes a nuclear energy facility at roughly 350 miles per hour (about the same speed as the aircraft that struck the Pentagon on September 11) does more harm to the plane than the structure. One can only imagine what dire consequences would come to a paraglider if he or she were to strike a nuclear energy facility at the same force!

Second, if the paraglider actually was a terrorist who had attempted to fly into a reactor and cause damage, he would have had a lot more to worry about—including the French military.

Threats of aerial attack are serious scenarios that are handled with great care by the military and air traffic control. These types of attacks are not something that government authorities, or nuclear energy facilities, take lightly and given such a scenario, there are provisions in place to “neutralize” the attacker. In fact, after the Greenpeace stunt, EDF’s head of the nuclear division Dominique Miniere confirmed this point.

The case of aircraft approaching nuclear plants is handled with great care and the French air force intervenes to divert airplanes violating--generally by mistake--the no-fly zone around nuclear plants, he said. "Sometimes airplanes get lost and they get the scare of their life," Miniere said.

This type of high-level, interagency security is mirrored in the United States, making U.S. nuclear energy facilities some of the best-defended facilities among the nation’s critical infrastructure. The utilities that operate the plant monitor the airspace around the nuclear energy facility and the government and the Transportation Security Administration protect the area.

After talking to NEI’s Security Director Dave Kline this morning about the Greenpeace stunt, he reassured me that U.S. nuclear plants are very secure facilities:

I am very confident that the U.S. plants would identify and neutralize any threats related to paragliders.

Put that way, I think Kline fully captures the ridiculousness of stunts by Greenpeace activists to show the “threat of aerial attack.” It only begs the question…what’s next? Hot air balloooning over a facility?

In the French case, officials were able to make the determination that the paraglider and his accomplice were not trying to cause harm, but rather, to make a political statement. This is why they arrested the activists immediately after the demonstration. In the future, I’d hate to hear about the copycat stuntman who meets a different fate and learns firsthand what the word “neutralize” means…

Photo: AFP/Greenpeace

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From Sweden to the Green River

Sort of a silly article from the New York Times:

Internet companies often cloak themselves in an image of environmental awareness. But some companies that essentially live on the Internet are moving facilities to North Carolina, Virginia, northeastern Illinois and other regions whose main sources of energy are coal and nuclear power, the report said.

Virginia generates 36 percent of its electricity from nuclear, 35 percent from coal; North Carolina, 56 percent coal, 31 percent nuclear; and Illinois, 47 percent nuclear, 46 percent coal. So, where clean energy is concerned, internet companies are doing reasonably well given the world we live in.

And some want to improve their profile further:

Apple immediately disputed the report’s findings, saying that the company planned to build two huge renewable energy projects at its recently opened data center in North Carolina that would eventually offset much of the coal-fired and nuclear energy use.

To me, this sounds like the wrong way around – the infrastructure seems plausible as is. Who are Apple and Google and others trying to please, anyway?

In the language of the Greenpeace report, those sources constitute “dirty energy,” meaning nonrenewable.

Oh, them – well, there’s nothing wrong with Greenpeace issuing reports, though I’m sure some of the appeal of moving the data centers to these states is the lure of plentiful and inexpensive electricity – thanks in part to nuclear energy. Apple’s “huge renewable energy projects” will nullify those benefits. (I couldn’t find anything on what Apple has in mind here.)

I was struck by a detail in this PCWorld story that Facebook, in pursuit of renewable energy for its data center, went to Sweden to find it – the center is using solar arrays, which it could have done here as easily if it wanted to. Sweden is already fully covered on the clean energy scale: 46 percent hydro and 43 percent nuclear. Anyway: Good for Facebook and Sweden – since the baseload energy is still half nuclear and all clean. (I recognize that Facebook has an international profile – Google has one of its data centers in neighboring Finland – and just to keep the circle squared, Finland is mostly clean energy, too – 28 percent nuclear, 16 percent hydro and 13 percent coal.)

It’s a little disappointing that the Times decided to gin up one of Greenpeace’s hectoring reports – it’s doing it again today. Feh.

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One of the problems with building a power plant is that it needs water, so if you want to build such a plant in a barren part of the country, you have to locate near whatever source exists. In Utah, that’s the Green River, described as a “robust tributary of the Colorado River.”

The problem is that the Green River cannot guarantee enough water to operate a plant year-round and there has to be an alternative source when that happens.

A company called Blue Castle, which wants to build a nuclear facility on the Green River, has settled on a reservoir:

The news release added that Blue Castle would have to have contingency plans if, for some reason, less water is available. The company plans to solve that problem by building an onsite reservoir that would hold a 30-day supply of water.

Blue Castle's chief executive officer is Aaron Tilton, who sat on the legislature's utilities committee, where he was an outspoken proponent of nuclear energy. While he was still in office, Tilton formed a nuclear energy development company, a forerunner to Blue Castle.

Blue Castle has permission to use the Green River water when it can be used and Tilton makes the case for it.

In an interview with InsideClimate News, Tilton acknowledged that "water is everything" in the West. But he also pointed out that the nuclear facility will use less than one percent of Utah's water allotment while increasing the state's electricity production by 50 percent.

Blue Castle has worked through issues diligently, as it should (and must), showing that its project will not harm fish and turning to the reservoir to cover drier spots (the river’s water has to give primacy to farming and drinking.) Environmentalists have kicked up a bit of a fuss, but Tilton seems fairly sure Blue Castle will prevail – as far as Utah is concerned, has prevailed.

There’s a lot more information in the story by David Hasemyer and it’s well worth reading for an exceptionally balanced view of the project. Whether Blue Castle can really get a facility built depends on a lot of factors – money not least among them – but so far, so good.

Correx: Made a better stab at the Finnish electricity mix. Still pretty good.

The Green River from the Deso Overlook. Not where the plant would go – but pretty none-the-less.

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