Like virtually everyone else, I've been watching the unfolding tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico with a growing sense of doom and sickness in my stomach. The oil has continued to spew at an alarming rate from the twisted remains of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig since the day of the explosion. It's like watching a tornado destroy you home in super-slow motion. And it continues.
The cost of the oil rig disaster in human lives (11 prompt fatalities) is terrible. The ecological cost to our gulf cost is yet to be bounded, grows by the day, and will probably linger beyond my lifetime. The economic impact on millions of Americans who draw their living from the sea and the vacation industry will likely be profound.
Why did this have to be the case - given the leak occurred ?
There are many avenues of pursuit to address this question, but the one I've been pondering during the past several days has to do with a simple technical reality: if the oil leak where in 200 feet of water, rather than 5000 feet of water, the leak might have been stopped by now.
Access is a prerequisite for remediation. It would be nice if we could put human divers down there to work the problem. I'm not a diver, but I understand commercial divers, using the best available equipment, can reach depths of less than 2000 feet and then only for very limited times. More routine commercial diving is done in waters of less than 300 feet in depth.
It's a given that if one is in the oil drilling business, one must drill where the oil is to be found. This said, drilling in shallow water is safer than drilling in deep water. Easier access if things go wrong. Oil drilling on land is safer still. Even easier access. (This does not account for the varying degress of sensitively of the natural environments surrounding drilling operations.)
But most vacationeers who pay a hefty sum for their ocean-front condos are not inclined to favor those places in which the views are dominated by oil rigs. In this respect, oil rigs share some of the same "vista challenge" issues as wind turbines.
So we can drill in deep water. Out of sight, out of mind. And when something goes wrong, it may be devilishly-difficult to correct. Or we can drill in shallow water. Fouls our view of that golden sunset, but we can probably fix a problem in 200-300 feet of water. Or we can drill on land. Access not an issue, but many of the remaining desirable drilling sights are in sensitive environmental areas.
As a personal note here, I've always been very circumspect about off-shore oil drilling due to my concerns that something like the Deepwater Horizon disaster might happen. And I've never embraced drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or similar sensitive ecosystems.
Just one more illustration of the complexity of our energy challenges and the difficult choices we must make to tackle them.
Cheers,
Sherrell
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Post # 16: The Price of Our Addiction To Fossil Fuel
I was listening again tonight to the latest news from the Gulf Coast regarding the evolving consequences of the April 22 explosion at the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. The news reminded me of the price we pay for our "addiction" to oil. While the potential environmental consequences are alarming, it is the human cost that attracted my attention.
Eleven workers were killed in the Deepwater Horizon accident. The Deepwater Horizon explosion is the deadliest U.S. offshore drilling rig explosion since 1968, when 11 died and 20 where injured in an explosion on a rig owned by Gulf Oil. The Deepwater Horizon tragedy follows on the heels of a March 2005 explosion in BP's Texas City refinery, when 15 were killed and hundreds were injured.
Then I thought of the tragic loss of 29 coal miners in early April in the Upper Big Branch coal mine explosion in West Virginia. The Sago mining disaster in 2006 killed twelve miners. The U.S. coal mining industry reported it's lowest fatality count in history in 2009 when 12 fatalities occurred. (Historically, China apparently has suffered around 5000 coal mining fatalities every year.)
The extraction and use of fossil fuels is a dirty, dangerous business.
I consulted several sources in an attempt to uncover the mining fatality statistics for uranium mining. All the sources I consulted acknowledged that uranium mining is much safer than coal mining, but I did not uncover hard statistics of the direct fatalities resulting from the uranium mining enterprise. I will continue to seek hard data (I'm sure it's available - just couldn't find it conveniently tonight) and I will update this posting when I uncover meaningful data.
I did uncover an interesting (and somewhat controversial) article from the Next Big Thing website (http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html). The article presents an analysis of the integrated "life-cycle" fatality rate per TWh of electricity generated from nuclear, coal, wind, and solar energy sources. (I caution that credible analyses of this type of are devilishly difficult to perform.) This analysis utilized a variety of data sources and it's methodology is not completely transparent. So, while I cannot validate or endorse this analysis as authoritative, the results do provide interesting fodder for energy-geek party conversation:
Coal: 163 fatalities per TWh
Rooftop Solar: 0.44-0.83 fatalities per TWh
Wind: 0.15 fatalities per TWh
Hydro: 0.1 fatalities per TWh
Nuclear: 0.04 fatalities per TWh
I'll continue my search for more detailed analyses...
The bottom line?
1. We pay a high cost in human loss and suffering from our addiction to fossil fuels.
2. There is no zero-risk energy production technology. No free lunch.
3. Energy generation from renewable sources is far superior to that from fossil energy sources.
4. Nuclear energy is among the most human-friendly, if not the most human-friendly energy production option.
Nuclear energy: a sustainable energy option.
Eleven workers were killed in the Deepwater Horizon accident. The Deepwater Horizon explosion is the deadliest U.S. offshore drilling rig explosion since 1968, when 11 died and 20 where injured in an explosion on a rig owned by Gulf Oil. The Deepwater Horizon tragedy follows on the heels of a March 2005 explosion in BP's Texas City refinery, when 15 were killed and hundreds were injured.
Then I thought of the tragic loss of 29 coal miners in early April in the Upper Big Branch coal mine explosion in West Virginia. The Sago mining disaster in 2006 killed twelve miners. The U.S. coal mining industry reported it's lowest fatality count in history in 2009 when 12 fatalities occurred. (Historically, China apparently has suffered around 5000 coal mining fatalities every year.)
The extraction and use of fossil fuels is a dirty, dangerous business.
I consulted several sources in an attempt to uncover the mining fatality statistics for uranium mining. All the sources I consulted acknowledged that uranium mining is much safer than coal mining, but I did not uncover hard statistics of the direct fatalities resulting from the uranium mining enterprise. I will continue to seek hard data (I'm sure it's available - just couldn't find it conveniently tonight) and I will update this posting when I uncover meaningful data.
I did uncover an interesting (and somewhat controversial) article from the Next Big Thing website (http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html). The article presents an analysis of the integrated "life-cycle" fatality rate per TWh of electricity generated from nuclear, coal, wind, and solar energy sources. (I caution that credible analyses of this type of are devilishly difficult to perform.) This analysis utilized a variety of data sources and it's methodology is not completely transparent. So, while I cannot validate or endorse this analysis as authoritative, the results do provide interesting fodder for energy-geek party conversation:
Coal: 163 fatalities per TWh
Rooftop Solar: 0.44-0.83 fatalities per TWh
Wind: 0.15 fatalities per TWh
Hydro: 0.1 fatalities per TWh
Nuclear: 0.04 fatalities per TWh
I'll continue my search for more detailed analyses...
The bottom line?
1. We pay a high cost in human loss and suffering from our addiction to fossil fuels.
2. There is no zero-risk energy production technology. No free lunch.
3. Energy generation from renewable sources is far superior to that from fossil energy sources.
4. Nuclear energy is among the most human-friendly, if not the most human-friendly energy production option.
Nuclear energy: a sustainable energy option.
Friday, April 23, 2010
Post # 15: Nuclear Energy As An Enabler of Renewable Energy
I believe the solution to many of our nation's most pressing energy and environmental challenges is more nuclear energy, as much solar and wind energy as we can "tolerate"; a smarter, more robust electrical transmission and distribution system; and electrification of the transportation sector.
I'm all for renewable energy. Seriously. Just don't mess-up my view of the mountains, don't kill endangered bats, useful insects, and birds. And whatever you do – don't dam up my trout stream.
So how much renewable energy (wind/solar) can we integrate into our electrical system? It turns out we have a few on-going real-world experiments that are giving us some good indicators. Texas has embraced wind energy in a big way. Around 9000 megawatts of windpower have been installed in the state. Sometime back I attended a conference in which a representative from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) spoke with pride about their success in expanding their wind-turbine-based electrical energy generation. Then he made the following statement, "We've just about reached the limit of the amount of wind energy generation we can add to the system. We will have to add more gas turbines or base-load coal or nuclear capacity in order to enable us to increase our wind generation." The reason?
It turns out that due both to the variability of the wind, and the nature of the electrical generation systems used in today's wind turbines, too much wind energy can actually destabilize an electrical generation system - leading to all sorts of serious problems - including voltage surges, load drops and blackouts.
I guess a good analogy would be to think of two vehicles you might drive. Imagine one vehicle has a single 200-horsepower engine and a single throttle pedal you control. Now imagine the second vehicle has one hundred, 2-horsepower engines. You don't have a throttle pedal for any of them. Worse yet, each of these one hundred engines runs independently, at varying speeds, on schedules that are very difficult to predict. Now your job is to drive one of these two vehicles from point A to point B on a fixed schedule. Which vehicle would you choose?
This (admittedly limited) vehicle analogy illustrates the problem we face as we add more and more wind and solar energy to an electrical grid. Eventually we lose control and the ability to manage the system. At some point, the variable nature of the renewable electrical generation overwhelms the predictable and controllable nature of the "base-load" generation and bad things happen. That point appears to be somewhere in the range of 20 – 30% of the total electrical generation. (Much can also depend on how widely dispersed the wind turbines are in location due to the resultant time variability in generation.)
What do we need to enable us to go beyond 20% renewables? Well, a breakthrough in energy storage devices for one thing – the ability to stabilize the system by storing the energy being generated that isn't needed on a moment-by-moment basis. And smarter electrical grids that give us more robust and precise control over both generation and consumption. Some of our best and brightest are working on these challenges.
So, in the near-term, how do places like Texas add more wind and solar capacity to their generating grid? By adding more quite, emissions-free base-load nuclear capacity that keeps the percentage of renewables at or below 20% of the total.
So for now, the best "enabler" of renewable energy is .... nuclear energy.
Nuclear and renewable energy - a match made in heaven...
P.S. For those of you more technically inclined and interested in the subject, a couple of interesting discussions of the Texas wind experience can be found at:
http://www.wind-watch.org/news/2010/04/03/wind-energy-under-fire-within-ercot/
http://www.rice.edu/energy/research/carbonsolutions/Hartley%20Presentation%20Aug09Workshop-SECURE.pdf
Cheers!
Sherrell
I'm all for renewable energy. Seriously. Just don't mess-up my view of the mountains, don't kill endangered bats, useful insects, and birds. And whatever you do – don't dam up my trout stream.
So how much renewable energy (wind/solar) can we integrate into our electrical system? It turns out we have a few on-going real-world experiments that are giving us some good indicators. Texas has embraced wind energy in a big way. Around 9000 megawatts of windpower have been installed in the state. Sometime back I attended a conference in which a representative from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) spoke with pride about their success in expanding their wind-turbine-based electrical energy generation. Then he made the following statement, "We've just about reached the limit of the amount of wind energy generation we can add to the system. We will have to add more gas turbines or base-load coal or nuclear capacity in order to enable us to increase our wind generation." The reason?
It turns out that due both to the variability of the wind, and the nature of the electrical generation systems used in today's wind turbines, too much wind energy can actually destabilize an electrical generation system - leading to all sorts of serious problems - including voltage surges, load drops and blackouts.
I guess a good analogy would be to think of two vehicles you might drive. Imagine one vehicle has a single 200-horsepower engine and a single throttle pedal you control. Now imagine the second vehicle has one hundred, 2-horsepower engines. You don't have a throttle pedal for any of them. Worse yet, each of these one hundred engines runs independently, at varying speeds, on schedules that are very difficult to predict. Now your job is to drive one of these two vehicles from point A to point B on a fixed schedule. Which vehicle would you choose?
This (admittedly limited) vehicle analogy illustrates the problem we face as we add more and more wind and solar energy to an electrical grid. Eventually we lose control and the ability to manage the system. At some point, the variable nature of the renewable electrical generation overwhelms the predictable and controllable nature of the "base-load" generation and bad things happen. That point appears to be somewhere in the range of 20 – 30% of the total electrical generation. (Much can also depend on how widely dispersed the wind turbines are in location due to the resultant time variability in generation.)
What do we need to enable us to go beyond 20% renewables? Well, a breakthrough in energy storage devices for one thing – the ability to stabilize the system by storing the energy being generated that isn't needed on a moment-by-moment basis. And smarter electrical grids that give us more robust and precise control over both generation and consumption. Some of our best and brightest are working on these challenges.
So, in the near-term, how do places like Texas add more wind and solar capacity to their generating grid? By adding more quite, emissions-free base-load nuclear capacity that keeps the percentage of renewables at or below 20% of the total.
So for now, the best "enabler" of renewable energy is .... nuclear energy.
Nuclear and renewable energy - a match made in heaven...
P.S. For those of you more technically inclined and interested in the subject, a couple of interesting discussions of the Texas wind experience can be found at:
http://www.wind-watch.org/news/2010/04/03/wind-energy-under-fire-within-ercot/
http://www.rice.edu/energy/research/carbonsolutions/Hartley%20Presentation%20Aug09Workshop-SECURE.pdf
Cheers!
Sherrell
Friday, April 9, 2010
Post # 14: Nuclear Waste May Get A Second Life
Nuclear power is the most dependable and economical non-emitting electricity production source available today – accounting for 70% of the non-carbon-emitting electricity production in the U.S. However, the once-through nuclear fuel cycle currently employed by our commercial nuclear power plants taps less than 10% of the energy value in the fuel. Reprocessing and re-use of the contents of used nuclear fuel would enable us to significantly increase the fraction of available energy extracted from the fuel and more efficiently utilize the earth's uranium resources.
The goal of nuclear fuel reprocessing research is to develop reprocessing approaches that are economically viable, environmentally acceptable, and secure from the proliferation vulnerability standpoint.
I had an opportunity recently to spend the day with National Public Radio's award-winning science journalist, Richard Harris. Richard came our way to research the status of nuclear fuel reprocessing research. His story ran today on NPR's Morning Edition. You can read and listen to the story at:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125740818
I think Richard did a nice job of presenting the issues, goals, and challenges associated with harnessing that untapped energy in used nuclear fuel and reducing the burden of the spent fuel and nuclear waste legacy of nuclear power.
The goal of nuclear fuel reprocessing research is to develop reprocessing approaches that are economically viable, environmentally acceptable, and secure from the proliferation vulnerability standpoint.
I had an opportunity recently to spend the day with National Public Radio's award-winning science journalist, Richard Harris. Richard came our way to research the status of nuclear fuel reprocessing research. His story ran today on NPR's Morning Edition. You can read and listen to the story at:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125740818
I think Richard did a nice job of presenting the issues, goals, and challenges associated with harnessing that untapped energy in used nuclear fuel and reducing the burden of the spent fuel and nuclear waste legacy of nuclear power.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Post # 13: A Common Sense Victory – The Vogtle Loan Guarantee
President Obama's announcement today that his administration will authorize the first federal loan guarantee for a new nuclear power plant should be a cause for celebration by all who seek a secure, low-carbon energy future for our nation. The $8.3B loan guarantee for Southern Company's Vogtle project is contingent on NRC approval of the combined construction/operating license for the two AP-1000 pressurized water reactors, and is the first for a nuclear power plant. This loan guarantee program, originally authorized under the Energy Policy Act of 2005, empowers the federal government to guarantee loans for projects that accelerate commercial deployment of new or improved technologies that will sustain economic grown, yield environmental benefits, or produce a more stable and secure energy future. Previous loan guarantees have been issued to solar photovoltaic, wind turbine, and and energy storage projects, as well as a carbon manufacturing plant. Thumbs up to the President !
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Post # 12: Your Life In Uranium and Coal
The average American consumes ~ 14000 kWh of electricity per year - among the highest in the world. That's roughly 1,120,000 kWh of electricity in an 80-year lifespan.
Let's examine how much fuel must be consumed in modern nuclear and coal-fired power plants to produce this amount of electricity – "your life in uranium and coal" so to speak...
Nuclear reactors are powered by fission process ~ 51000 fuel pins (in a typical gigawatt-class nuclear power plant). Each of these fuel pins is approximately 1/3-inch in diameter and ~ 12 feet in length (there are many variations, but these are reasonable average numbers.)
Based on the current once-through nuclear fuel cycle (which, by the way, extracts < 10% of the energy that is theoretically available in the fuel), the 14000 kWh of electricity each of us "consume" in a year is produced in only 2.6 inches of ONE nuclear fuel rod! If you "run the numbers", this means that all of the electricity consumed by one American during their 80-yr life is produced by less than two of these small fuel pins ! In more familiar terms, that's about a soda can of nuclear fuel, or a cube of nuclear fuel a bit less than 4 inches on a side. How's that for an efficient energy source?
Now compare these estimates to the amount of coal required to produce the same amount of energy. The average energy content of coal is ~ 6150 kW(t)h / metric ton. If we assume 40% overall thermal efficiency of the coal-fired plant (generous on average), that same American would consume ~ 455 metric tons of coal. That's equivalent to a solid cube of coal 135-ft on a side.
So picture this... a soda can of nuclear fuel or a cube of coal 135 feet on a side:
That's "your life in uranium and coal"...
Cheers,
Sherrell
Monday, January 18, 2010
Post # 11: Putting A Lid On Bottled Water ?
Do you ever wonder about the energy consumption and CO2 footprint of a bottle of that cold, clear, water you pickup from the local quick-mart on the way to/from your kid's soccer game? I became curious about this recently after noticing a beautiful bottle of south-pacific water in my hotel room.
After some digging, I found a very interesting short paper by Gleick and Cooley of the Pacific Institute (http://www.pacinst.org/reports/bottled_water/index.htm) that analyzed this exact question (well.. the energy consumption part of it anyway). The paper, entitled, "Energy Implications of Bottled Water," is available online at http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/1748-9326/4/1/014009/erl9_1_014009.pdf?request-id=9c25df5f-a5c7-4263-aae2-e12b73d47bb0 .
Gleick and Cooley analyzed three scenarios for bottled water consumed in the Los Angles area: (1) water locally bottled, (2) water bottled in Fiji, and (3) water bottle in France. The paper concludes that, depending on the bottling location, the energy required to purify, bottle, and deliver 1 liter of cold, clear bottled water to the consumer's lips is between 5.6 and 10.2 MJthermal/liter. (The larger number is associated with water produced in Fiji. The energy demand would be even larger for an east-coast USA consumer.
According to Gleick and Cooley, the US consumed approximately 33 million liters of bottled water in 2007. So if we extrapolate to the total effective energy required to meet the US market, 33E6 liters * 10 MJthermal/liter = 330E6 MJthermal.
The effective carbon footprint of this bottled water depends, of course on the source of the thermal energy. If we assumed ALL of the energy required came from coal, and assuming a conversion factor of ~ 0.38 kg CO2 / MJthermal, the total CO2 footprint of our bottled-water addiction is approximately 330E6 MJthermal * 0.38 kg CO2 / MJthermal = 125,400,000 kg CO2 or 125,400 MT CO2. Recalling our total annual US CO2 emissions is approximately 6,000,000,000 MT CO2, this represents approximately 0.002% of our total annual CO2 emissions.
Significant? You be the judge...
Cheers,
Sherrell
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