Teaming Nuclear and Renewable Energies

I would like to provide a link to James Hansen's Open letter "Tell Barack Obama the Truth - The Whole Truth" published Nov. 21, 2008

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/20081121_Obama.pdf

We know how to build much better less waste generating fission nuclear using America's second nuclear fuel, Thorium.

Nuclear energy produces 70% of America's non-Green House Gas generating energy and can be scaled more rapidly to allow America to actually reach its ambitious GHG targets within the next decade.

Most people think the prius is pretty fuel efficient at twice the mileage. Generation iv nuclear reactors are 100-300 times as fuel efficient (no, that isn't a typo) as current generation ii or iii reactors, and can even burn up stockpiled nuclear waste as fuel. leading climate expert James Hansen, a recent convert to nuclear energy, discusses these reactors in his letter to Obama, "tell Obama the truth," available on the web. If only the public were more aware of this incredible energy source.

The combination of nuclear and renewable energy supplies makes good sense to me as a business owner and former power engineer/renewable energy developer.

Nuclear power has an excellent safety record and provides a concentrated high capacity factor base load power supply. The new design of reactors are less complex and have gravity based shutdown systems. There are opportunities to reprocess what has been classified as spent fuel into new forms of fuel that can significantly extend fuel supplies into the future. Sure, more work needs to be done on this but reprocessing looks promising. As stated in the above post, there are also potential opportunities to use Thorium as a nuclear fuel.

We also have huge opportunities to develop renewables ranging from offshore and onshore wind, to Concentrating Solar Thermal Power (CSP) with thermal storage, geothermal, hydopower, hydrodynamic power, Solar PV, and other technologies which are practical using currently available technology. Renewables also offer opportunities for localized distributed power production. Many of us could generate power from our own rooftops. This is especially true if we are able to implement Feed In Tariff policies as suggested by the World Future Council http://www.worldfuturecouncil.org/arguing_fits.html

Offshore wind, CSP and Solar PV offer particularly good opportunities for renewable power generation. In fact, the US southwestern desert is one of a handful of the best places in the world to develop CSP.

In order to bring some of these power sources to market, however, we will also need to upgrade the power transmission grid and add some EHV and/or HVDC transmission lines. Here, as an example, is a recent proposal by Michigan's ITC Holdings Corp. for a green power express transmission line. http://investor.itc-holdings.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=364150 This must be handled on a nationwide basis to streamline the permitting process while taking into account individual state concerns.

We are very late in dealing with fossil fuel depletion (see www.peakoil.net) and its implications for energy and the economy. When you think of it, Energy=the Economy and replacing fossil fuels is going to be a daunting task given the scale of our energy use. We need to get going quickly with some of these practical steps to help bring us into the new 21st Centrury. Oh, taking these steps will create a lot of jobs too.

The United States chose the LWR development path and the Uranium/Plutonium Fuel Cycle in the 1950s for civilian nuclear power in large part because research and development had already been done by the Navy, and it thus presented the shortest time to market of reactor concepts then under consideration. Little emphasis was given to the issues of nuclear waste. Today the situation is very different. If nuclear energy is to be used widely to replace coal, in the United States and/or the developing world, issues of waste, safety, and proliferation become paramount. We need to re evaluate the choice of nuclear fuels and fuel cycles in light of current national requirements. Uranium/Plutonium was chosen by the United States in the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War, because of the combined need for weapons and power generation. More abundant Thorium nuclear fuel is very well suited for power generation but would be a difficult but not impossible material to use to make a nuclear weapon.

A modest investment in commercializing Thorium Molten Salt Nuclear Technology would provide large dividends to the Country and allow us to actually meet our Global Warming Green House Gas reduction goals. After a decade of subsidies and tax advantages solar and wind still provide only about 1.6% of our energy. If we double our wind and solar power generation in the next 4 years we will still produce only slightly over 3% of our power by renewable sources.

If we commercialized Thorium Molten Salt technology already proven at the nation's National Laboratories in successful demonstration research reactors we could reduce high level nuclear waste generation by a factor of 1 part in 100 and radio-toxicity of the waste to 1 part in 1000 over the performance of current LWR nuclear technology[1].

It would be wise to invest in less waste generating nuclear in parallel with our investment in renewable energy solutions and actually reach our ambitious GHG targets.

[1] Revisiting the thorium uranium nuclear fuel cycle, © European Physical Society, EDP Sciences 2007. This article can be downloaded from http://dx.doi.org/10.1051/EPN:2007007

Note1: Thorium Molten Salt Reactors are not "crank" science. Dr. Edward Teller, the founding director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, wrote his final paper a month before his death on the subject of the advantages of Thorium Molten Salt Reactors and the contribution this style of less polluting nuclear energy could provide to achieving energy independence while reducing the need to generate green house gases. This paper can be downloaded from the following URL:
http://www.geocities.com/rmoir2003/moir_teller.pdf

I am currently a first year PhD student in Nuclear Engineering at the University of Wisconsin - Madison and my research develops simulation software that is like Sim City for the nuclear industry. We're able to simulate the industry growth and material requirements to meet global energy demands and simulate everything from political turmoil to waste disposal disruption.

The integrity of this simulation and the results have convinced me entirely that the short answer to the question of energy in our world is going to necessarily include nuclear, and should, in an optimal case, utilize reprocessing technology.

The fact is that at a conservative electricity demand growth rate of 2% requires a quantity of energy unattainable by any green energy generation portfolio except those including nuclear. The reality is that we're facing a growth rate future much greater than 2%.

I feel very strongly that energy sustainability is the greatest scientific challenge mankind faces today, and it is in the hopes that nuclear power might become a safe, environmentally sustainable option for energy production that I am preparing to devote the majority of my limited human efforts to new fuel cycle research and analysis initiatives. I am voting for nuclear with my career, as has Angie Howard.

Let us bring the facts of this industry to the world.