Where Is Our Energy Mix Headed, and When Will It Get There?

A reader posed a series of questions, to which I respond in italics below each.

• Are we at so saturated a point now with atmospheric carbon and methane, and the climbing global temp, that the long-delaying elite of our species has effectively blackmailed the rest of us into using old nuclear as a transition bridge?

This is a controversial item.  There are plenty of top scientists who say that it’s already too late to fix this, where others, fortunately, are more hopeful.  Personally, I’m with the latter camp, if only because of the advancements in technology and the growing cost-effectiveness of renewables.  Of course, it’s our robo-consumption of red meat that’s killing us far faster than our reliance on fossil fuels.  Where is that going?  I’m not sure, but it doesn’t look good.

I honestly don’t know what the elite are doing, and if they’re connected to nuclear.  I would be surprised if lots of power people are currently profiting from nuclear, if only because it’s being phased out in many key places, and these are people who tend not to lose too often.

• What’s your best guess of the number of decades before we can wean off transitional old nuclear onto sustainable wind and solar with storage – or, onto sufficiently developed, proven and scaled advanced nuclear?

It depends almost completely on political will.  If we somehow come together with the common understanding that we really are frying this planet and decide to do something about it, we could make the turnaround within 20 years.  Note that the “turnaround” doesn’t have to mean the end of every bit of fossil fuel; when we keep in mind the economics, it will be far less expensive overall if we can keep natural gas around for a very long while to come.

From what I read, the commercialization of advanced nuclear is at least 30 years.

• My concern with the old style nuclear is the long term contamination even with ‘safe’ use, and the breach and meltdown risks with ‘unforseen (forseen) accidents’ like Fukushima and potentially at Diablo Canyon (now shutting down but not yet fully decommissioned). Are my concerns entirely groundless?

I wouldn’t say they are groundless, but few people who take that position are looking at the cold facts: historically, nuclear energy has been extremely safe relative to literally everything else.  More people have gotten killed in the wind industry, believe it or not. 

• Is the Fukushima incident essentially harmless, or even a representation of justifiable risk?

There is no way for me to know, because there’s a huge amount of evidence that suggests we’re being lied to by everyone who would be in a position to answer that question.  Certainly a lot of what you hear about contaminated oceans is overblown in the extreme. 

What concerns me most about alarmist reports is that they are essentially dishonest.  The anti-nuke folks are telling people who don’t know the first thing about this subject that the contamination from Fukushima has increased the number of Bequerels per cubic meter of seawater by a factor of 1000.  But we’re not telling them that this figure is still infinitesimally smaller than the point at which there is danger.   It’s impossible not to be alarmed when you hear things that are phrased to make you think that a catastrophe is unfolding.  I recall how freaked out I was in kindergarten when a 6th grader told me on the bus to school that my epidermis was showing.  It’s really the same here, only it’s not a prank; the consequences are potentially lethal for the planet.  I’m a big fan of honesty and objectivity, as I know you are.

• By the way, I have to say I’m a little surprised to see your mention of baseload and intermittance. Are storage solutions not available to resolve that issue with widespread use of sustainables like wind and solar along wherever they make sense with an HVDC grid?

It depends on what you mean by “available.”  Yes, storage and transmission are both available at a certain level, though doing what we would like to with either one of them is an extremely expensive undertaking.  Assuming we had the political will for a full-on attack to the energy issue (which we most emphatically do not), it would still be hard to know exactly how all these pieces will eventually fit together: storage, transmission, efficiency, solar, wind, other renewables, and nuclear.  I’m deeply skeptical of anyone who claims to know how this is going to happen, when indeed it does.  Obviously, it’s a function of which powerful people can become even more powerful by forwarding a certain technology.  That puts me completely in the dark; I have no insight into those who are calling the shots here on planet Earth. 

• Until March 2011 Germany generated one-quarter of its electricity from nuclear energy, using 17 reactors. The figure is now about 16% from eight reactors as of May of this year. Is coal Germany’s only practical option with their shutdown of old nuclear?

It’s not black and white, for the reasons I alluded to above, i.e., there are lots of variables at play here.  Germany’s penetration of renewables is so high already that it’s difficult for them to increase it further and still keep their grid stable, and losing baseload makes that even harder—thus the fact that they’re burning more coal.  Of course, this will change in some as yet unknowable way according to all the issues discussed above: storage, transmission, etc. 

• Is it not possible to offset the impact of such shutdowns substantially with increased efficiency? I can see how that would be an issue in France where they generate 80% of their electricity with old nuclear, but that’s not the case in Germany.

Absolutely.  Efficiency solutions are by far the most cost-effective tools we can bring to bear to clean up our energy generation/consumption.  This too, however, is not a straightforward subject because, like everything else, it’s about money.  Here are a few random questions to think about:  Is it worth pulling the electric motors out of hundreds of millions of pumps worldwide because new motors are more efficient than old ones?  We have nice new refrigerators here in the U.S, but in the developing world; they have old beaters that are horrifically inefficient.  How do we build the affluence necessary to make these new appliances affordable?  What’s the return on investment for a CFO—or homeowner—to retrofit an existing industrial building, factory, home, or whatever, vs. simply eating the costs of higher electricity bills?  The answers aren’t obvious, and they’re not consistent from one case to the next. 

• I appreciate your sharing your expertise, as always.

Happy to help!