Energywise

A three-member panel of the D.C. Federal Court of Appeals said yesterday that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission must reconsider whether spent nuclear fuel can safely be stored until a solution to the problem of permanent disposal is found, or even if such a solution never is found. The decision by the District of Columbia court, which has influence second only to the Supreme Court in matters of public policy, is bound to have a wide impact on current practices, proceedings for renewing reactor operating licenses, and future waste policy development.

Explaining the background to the suit, which was brought by New York State and a group of intervenors, the court wrote, "Due to the government’s failure to establish a final resting place for spent [nuclear] fuel , SNF is currently stored on site at nuclear plants. This type of storage, optimistically labeled 'temporary storage,' has been used for decades longer than originally anticipated. The delay has required plants to expand storage pools and to pack SNF more densely within them. The lack of progress on a permanent repository has caused considerable uncertainty regarding the environmental effects of temporary SNF storage and the reasonableness of continuing to license and relicense nuclear reactors."

A national plan adopted in the 1990s called for a permanent geologic storage facility to be built at Yucca Mountain, near the former nuclear weapons test site in Nevada, but that plan ran into sharp local opposition, fueled in part by scientific uncertainty as to whether the underground facility would be impervious to water intrusion over thousands of years. President Obama killed the plan after taking office, fulfilling a campaign commitment. In the meantime, reactors were regularly relicensed on the basis of  findings by the NRC that spent fuel could be safely stored in cooling ponds and dry casks until such time as a permanent resting place was found. But then, last year, the catatrophe at Japan's Fukushima plant— and in particular a fire that broke out in a spent fuel pond—refocused attention in the United States (and elsewhere) on whether spent fuel is in fact safe in increasingly crowded ponds.

The D.C. court panel unanimously took the NRC to task for neglecting to assess the safety of individual storage ponds across the country (treating the problem of cooling pond safety generically instead). The court also chided the agency for not adequately considering the possibility that water might leak from ponds and fuel might subsequently ignite. According to Matthew Wald, who has covered spent nuclear fuel disposal authoritatively for many years at the New York Times, the NRC will now have to "prepare and publicly defend an assessment that [local] storage for many decades or even indefinitely [does] not entail large risks." And that assessment will again be open to challenge in reactor licensing proceedings.

That, in turn, would appear to have two other obvious implications. One is that pressure will mount further for accelerated movement of spent fuel out of crowded ponds and into safer dry casks. As noted here this time last year, a much larger fraction of U.S. spent fuel could be in dry casks than is the case at present. Second, the new chairwoman of the NRC, who happens to be a well-regarded geologist, has her work cut out for her. Finding a new approach to the problem of permanent spent fuel disposal will be hugely difficult and perhaps impossible. But Allison M. Macfarlane at least appears to be about as well qualified for the job as one could hope.

Efforts to turn waste into energy are increasing around world, and booming in the United Kingdom. Supermarkets especially are investing in biogas technologies, or at least shipping their waste to renewable energy plants, according to a Bloomberg report.

Government subsidies and requirements play a part in encouraging the purchase of clean energy, but so do the hefty landfill taxes. The U.K. garbage tax, which was £64 (about US $100) per ton in April, increases by £8 every year. For the large supermarket chains, that fee adds up, as do their heavy energy bills. Executives agree that reducing energy costs is just good business, and that means renewable energy—and the government energy credits that go with it.

The Renewable Obligation program requires utilities to buy a certain amount of electricity from clean sources. The program issues certificates for each megawatt-hour produced from renewable sources. If a utility company doesn’t get enough Renewable Obligation Certificates, it must pay a penalty. Different techs get different credits, with anaerobic digestion getting two.

Anaerobic digestion turns organic material into biogas by breaking down the substance in an oxygen-free environment. For supermarkets burdened with food waste, it’s an irresistible option. Experiments with leftovers—fish heads, rotisserie chicken fats, lamb chops, rotting vegetables, sandwich breads—are taking place across the U.K. Market chains are also exploring and using solar panels, wood chips, and geothermal power. And the demonstrated financial benefits are spurring the construction of new power plants.

Tesco saves £200 million a year. Marks & Spencer saved £70 million last year. And Wal-Mart’s Asda expects to save £800 million by 2020. Sainsbury’s plans to build 40 waste-to-energy electricity plants in the next five years.

With the increasing costs of sending trash to landfills, shipping it to bioenergy plants makes tremendous sense. Government predictions state that bioenergy could supply at least 8 percent of the U.K.’s demand by 2020.

But investments and benefits are not limited to one country. Worldwide, companies have invested about $18.2 billion in waste energy technology. In North America it's the trash haulers. In Brazil, incinerators are being built. French and Dutch airlines are running planes on cooking oil. And a Brazilian airline is even testing sugarcane as a fuel. 

Photo: Courtesy Ze-gen, Waste Gasification Goes Commercial

Newspapers carried reports at the end of last week that atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide in the Arctic have passed the 400 ppm milestone. Their level is roughly 50 percent higher than at the time since the industrial revolution started 250 years ago--a concentration well measured from sampling of ice cores in Greenland and Antarctica --and indeed higher than at any time during the 200 000 years homo sapiens has roamed Earth or the last 800 000 years for which ice core measurements are possible and available.

The report that we have crossed the 400-ppm threshold inspired the U.S. political satirist Stephen Colbert to devote a segment of his show last night, June 4, to climate change. Colbert, a native of South Carolina, linked the new measurement of atmospheric CO2 to the 1-meter rise in global sea levels that climate modelers are predicting for the next century. Don't worry, said Colbert, "We [really] have no idea how much devastation that might cause, because [after all] it's metric."

The subject of climate change is near and dear to Colbert's heart, and especially to his South Carolina beach house, he went on to observe. But again, not to worry! In neighboring North Carolina, real estate and development interests claiming to speak for the state's 20 coastal counties have persuaded legislators to introduce a bill prohibiting planners from referring to the 1-meter sea rise estimate. Instead they should base planning on linear extrapolations from historic trends in sea level.

"Sea, no evil!" commented Colbert. And forget about those annoying insurance actuaries predicting that eventually you will die. "I've been alive all my life, therefore [on a linear projection}, I always will be alive."

Colbert is by no means the only observer of the U.S. scene to be taking acidic note of North Carolina's NC-20. North Carolina native Scott Huler, blogging for Scientific American, has weighed in with a similar riff. "According to North Carolina law, I am a billionaire. I have a full-time nanny for my children, [and] I have won the Pulitzer Prize…You think I’m kidding, but listen to me: I’m from North Carolina, and that’s how we roll. We take what we want to be reality, and we just make it law… 'Because that’s how I WANT it to be.' ”

For a serious treatment of how the sea rise issue is being handled in a number of coastal areas of the United States that will be affected, see the article by Sara Peach, who teaches environmental journalism at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, at Yale University’s Forum on Climate Change and the Media. One of her conclusions: Future rising waters do not by themselves have much sway; they must be linked to more tangible environmental issues to get general attention.

New science confirms that burning trees to produce power instead of coal may be a losing strategy for combatting climate change. 

In my April 2012 Spectrum news article on the questionable carbon benefits of largescale biomass power generation, I identified a boom in exports of wood pellets from the U.S. Southeast to Europe, where they are fast becoming a crucial energy supply for power firms seeking to meet the European Union’s renewable energy and carbon reduction mandates. 

Forbes Magazine greentech columnist (and friend) Erica Gies noted my analysis in a May 22 blog post, Massachusetts Addresses "Biomass Loophole" and Limits Subsidies, about recently-issued regulations that set higher standards for biomass power plants seeking state-issued renewable energy certificates. The regulations eliminate the presumption that biomass power is carbon-neutral and, instead, require some proof from power generators that their operations—including fuel harvesting—deliver environmental benefits. Gies describes the state move as "an important course correction to the 'biomass loophole' that wood from forests has enjoyed in many policy frameworks around the world."

That was too much for the Portland, ME-based Biomass Power Association. In a comment, BPA representative Gary Melow criticized Gies for citing biomass critics in Massachusetts who successfully lobbied for the regulatory change. Melow asserts that their view on biomass is "not widely shared" and calls Gies' piece "outdated" (among other bad names). In defense of biomass power's carbon benefits he cites preliminary conclusions from an EPA expert review of carbon accounting that, according to Melow, "appears to have rejected the assertion…that burning biomass won’t help address climate change."

In fact, the EPA panel also wrote that "carbon neutrality is not an appropriate a priori assumption; it is a conclusion that should be reached only after considering a particular feedstock’s production and consumption cycle.” (That balance was provided by Mary Booth, an environmental scientist with the Massachusetts-based Partnership for Policy Integrity, in her own comment to Gies' piece.)

And, despite Melow's assertion to the contrary, the scientific critique of biomass burning's carbon impact is growing, not aging. Consider this week's report by researchers at Duke University and Oregon State that finds that leaving forests intact will do more to curb climate change over the next century than cutting and burning their wood as fuel. As Stephen Mitchell, a research scientist at Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment, puts it in the university's press release: "Substituting woody bioenergy for fossil fuels isn't an effective method for climate change mitigation...In most cases, it would take more than 100 years for the amount of energy substituted to equal the amount of carbon storage achieved if we just let the forests grow and not harvest them at all."

Mitchell is lead author of the study, which is published in the peer-reviewed journal Global Change Biology Bioenergy.

There is some nuance possible to this debate, if the parties can hew more closely to the facts. Mitchell and colleagues found that performing partial harvests every 50 to 100 years or so -- instead of clear-cutting forests -- could render biomass power carbon neutral or positive. But, as coauthor Kari O'Connell of Oregon State University notes, such low-intensity forestry would also generate less bioenergy. "It's a Catch-22," says O'Connell.

Fresh off the record-setting solar weekend in Germany, the country's transmission operators say plans are in the works for a huge transmission line buildout to accommodate growing wind power resources.

The goal is to build 3800 kilometers (more than 2300 miles) of high-voltage lines—2100 km direct current lines and 1700 alternating current lines—stretching from the coasts of the Baltic and North Seas toward the southern parts of the country. The North Sea is already home to a few offshore turbines (and the government wants about 10 gigawatts of offshore wind installed by 2022 in order to help meet the country's renewable energy goals). By 2030, the hope is that more than 25 gigawatts will be installed—something on the order of 5000 turbines, depending on size.

Transmission is no easy thing to build, however. The new lines will cost around €20 billion (close to $25 billion), and there will need to be some serious buy-in from the public and politicians alike to get the project done. "We need to see a closing of ranks with politics to make sure the network expansion works," said Klaus Kleinekorte, CEO of transmission operator Amprion, in the Financial Times.

He emphasized the importance of starting on these projects as soon as possible with the aim of having them delivering power by 2020 at the latest. Germany will spend the next few decades in a bit of an energy crunch, having already taken some nuclear plants offline after Fukushima and the remainder scheduled to be totally shuttered by 2022. The strained grid will face a higher risk for big blackouts as nukes shut down and renewables come online, which good new transmission networks could ease.

And that $25 billion price tag may seem steep, but it's just a tiny part of the overall energy picture in Germany. Earlier this year, Siemens estimated that the nuclear phaseout overall could cost more than $2 trillion. It's refreshing to see the country staring some of these big energy issues so full in the face—even with logistical and cost difficulties everywhere, Germany is clearly not fooling around when it comes to renewable energy.

Image via Steffen Ramsaier

Note: Post has been updated to correct mistake regarding location of the Baltic Sea.

Solar power plants in Germany peaked at 22 gigawatts of output for a few hours on Friday and Saturday, yielding almost half the country's energy needs from the renewable resource and setting a new record in the process. The not-particularly-sunny country has long been a leader in solar power thanks to favorable policies like feed-in tariffs. In the wake of the decision to shutter all of its nuclear plants, solar power will need to play an even bigger role in the future. That 22 gigawatts of output is equal to about 20 nuclear reactors.

"Never before anywhere has a country produced as much photovoltaic electricity," said Norbert Allnoch, director of the Institute of the Renewable Energy Industry in Muenster, according to Reuters. And some think that Monday will have been even better: because it is a holiday in Germany and most workplaces are closed, there is the possibility that all of Germany's power needs will be supplied by the sun, at least for a couple of hours.

This would of course be the first time that a country of that size, with large power demands, could produce enough renewable energy to actually run the whole ship. But it is not the first time for any country -- Denmark, among the world leaders in wind energy, sometimes does produce more energy from turbines than the country can use. And on a more localized level, even parts of the U.S. see similar effects: in 2010 I spoke with a representative from PJM Interconnection, a regional transmission operator, who said that there are times of day when demand is low and the wind blows strongly when the price of electricity can actually go negative. In other words, supply exceeds demand.

That negative price includes both renewables and traditional generation, of course, but the fact is that renewable resources are starting to pile up in a number of areas. This past winter in Spain was another example: the country got almost 30 percent of its power from wind over a full two-week period at the beginning of February.

These isolated milestones of renewable generation do raise the specter of storage, however. Without good options for storing excess power, any extra supply is essentially lost. There are other solutions on well-connected grids -- Denmark can export some of that wind power to the rest of Europe, and work is continuing on ideas like vehicle-to-grid (V2G) storage, where a fleet of electric cars could act as batteries for renewable energy. And though records like Germany's are great, we are still a ways off from consistently deriving such large percentages of power from renewable sources.

Image via GruneFraktionBayern

A refrain running through the debate over global warming suggests we need to do nothing to slow it, because after all, the climate science predicting more warming could turn out to be wrong. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake, and Galileo almost was, for objecting to the scientific doctrine that the Sun revolves around the Earth. For two thousand years people believed in systems of physics and astronomy that turned out to be incorrect. And for a few more centuries after that they held to a new celestial mechanics only to see it displaced by relativity theory.

Following publication in 1962 of Thomas Kuhn's seminal Structure of Scientific Revolutions, science historians heatedly disputed the question of whether Einstein had shown Newtonian physics to be wrong, as Kuhn argued, or merely incomplete. But surely the important point, from a practical point of view, is that Newton's physics made predictions that were mostly true; for that matter, the same went for Aristotelian physics and Ptolemaic astronomy, which after all recognized that objects fall down not up and accurately described the movements of celestial objects to a very refined degree.

The plain fact of the matter is that when it comes with dealing with real-world problems on a day-to-day basis, we have no choice but to proceed on the basis of the science we have. Steven Hochstadt, a PhD historian who teaches in Illinois, made the point nicely in a recent newspaper column in which he considered climate science in the context of issues he encounters in caring for his aging mother.

"The medical and scientific uncertainties connected with my mother’s health are a very immediate concern. Although most days are similar and uneventful, sometimes crucial decisions must be made within hours. Everyone must be ready to think about all the evidence we have, all the alternatives for action or inaction....

"Medicine is a highly developed branch of science. In other kinds of science, there is usually much less pressure to come to a decision.  ... The more distant a particular kind of science is from our immediate needs, the more resistant people can be to reaching potentially unpleasant conclusions.

"Global warming is a good example. Thus far, warming has had little effect on most people’s lives and it will be years, even decades, before the consequences of climate change affect our daily lives, or those of our children and grandchildren. So the necessity of paying attention to all the evidence, of applying careful logic, of reaching careful conclusions, can easily become subordinated to wishful thinking and unwillingness to abandon comfortable assumptions."

To put it bluntly, would you defy the medical consensus and risk allowing your mother to suffer needlessly or die, just because the medical consensus might turn out to be wrong?

Hochstadt is surely right that people are reluctant to accept unpleasant conclusions and take costly actions, as long as really dangerous developments seem far-off. But he may somewhat overstate just how distant dangerous developments are and understate the possibility of catastrophic changes taking place at any time. His own region of the country, the American Middle West, is susceptible to adverse consequences that could drastically affect its status as one of the world's great breadbaskets.

Don Wuebbles, a prominent climate scientists at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, has been pointing out for years that if present-day trends continue, by the end of this century, Illinois's climate will closely resemble that of East Texas. Though East Texas is by no means a wasteland, not a lot of corn grows there, as followers of Wuebbles have pointed out online.

Somewhat paradoxically, global warming can make a region more arid and yet more vulnerable to the occasional devastating rainstorm. And in fact, one recent study finds that the frequency of heavy rainstorms in the Middle West has increased more than 50 percent in the last decade.

“Global studies already show that human-caused climate change is driving more extreme precipitation, and now we’ve documented how great the increase has been in the Midwest and linked the extreme storms to flooding in the region," commented Stephen Saunders of the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization, which did the study with the Natural Resources Defense Council. "A threshold may already have been crossed, so that major floods in the Midwest perhaps now should no longer be considered purely natural disasters but instead mixed natural/unnatural disasters."

The announcement by the Obama administration that it would nominate Allison M. Macfarlane to be the next chairperson of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, just days after current NRC Chairman Gregory B. Jaczko announced he would resign a year before his term was up, strongly suggests that Jaczko was squeezed out and that the administration urgently wants to improve management of the commission. Acceleration of Jaczko's replacement permits the administration to seek joint confirmation of Macfarlane and Kristine L. Svinicki, an incumbent commissioner appointed by President George W. Bush and now re-appointed for a second term by President Obama.

The selection of Macfarlane, a geologist who has specialized in nuclear waste management, may also suggest that the administration wants the NRC to speed up development of a plan for a permanent geologic disposal of spent nuclear fuels. Macfarlane co-edited a book on geological uncertainties affecting the proposed repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, and she recently served on a blue ribbon panel assessing the country's nuclear future. The absence of a firm plan for long-term disposal of nuclear wastes is widely considered the most important single factor undermining public confidence in nuclear energy management. An associate professor at George Mason University, Macfarlane earned her doctorate at MIT and has held prestigious fellowships at Harvard and Stanford.

No tears are being shed for Gregory B. Jaczko, the embattled chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, who announced at the beginning of this week that he would resign before his five-year term is up, as soon as a successor can be chosen. Never popular in nuclear circles, Jaczko was a former aide to Nevada Senator Harry Reid and Massachusetts Representative Edward J. Markey, the industry's sharpest and most effective critic on the Hill. He was named NRC chairman at the behest of Reid, the Senate majority leader, with the express mission of killing plans for a long-term waste depository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

As chairman, Jaczko lived up to the low expectations of his political opponents while failing to satisfy his allies. His relations with fellow commissioners were poor, and complaints by NRC staff of an abrasive management style got wide attention in the press. At a time when nuclear energy is in need of strong and inspiring leadership in the United States, Jaczko was unable to win the respect of his colleagues and rally them to address problems effectively as they arose.

All too typical was a situation involving a Nebraska nuclear power plant, described in today's Wall Street Journal, where it took an unconscionable amount of time for the NRC to decide whether a serious mishap--a fire that cut off cooling to the plant's spent fuel cooling pond—was truly "serious."

Such incidents have contributed to a widening public impression that management of the U.S. nuclear industry still more closely resembles that in the dark ages than what we were supposed to see in the so-called renaissance. Hence the kind of lead seen recently in a Florida newspaper, in an article commenting on the latest rate hike being imposed on customers to fund a planned nuclear power plant:

Stop me if you've heard this one. You and Progress Energy walk into a bar. Progress says it's going to order $24 billion worth of drinks, but they won't arrive until 2024. Oh, and you have to pick up the tab — even if the server drops the tray and the drinks never arrive at all.

This was the third rate hike requested and approved for a plant that is running eight years behind schedule and whose projected cost has ballooned to $24 billion from $17 billion in five years.

The prototype for the first practical "artificial leaf," which has been hyped in the media since its flashy debut at the American Chemical Society national meeting last year, has hit development hurdles and will not be scaled up for field testing. The leaf, a playing-card-sized coated-silicon sheet, turns sunlight into storable fuel by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, but at a cost that's too high to justify further development, the prototype's maker told the journal Nature.

Hydrogen from a solar panel and electrolysis unit can currently be made for about US$7 per kilogram, the firm estimates; the artificial leaf would come in at US$6.50. (It costs just $1-2 to make a kilogram of hydrogen from fossil fuels.) With the prices of solar cells dropping all the time, the firm is not going to make a heavy investment that's unlikely to pay off. Instead, it is looking at cheaper designs—but these require yet-to-be-invented semiconductor materials.  

The leaf was designed by chemistry professor Daniel Nocera at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who founded Sun Catalytix in Cambridge to pursue development. Other groups have had some success with artificial photosynthesis before, but always hit stumbling blocks. Nocera's group made it work, in part, by using cheap, abundant materials as catalysts. The design involves joining a commercially available triple-junction solar cell to two catalysts: cobalt-borate for splitting the water molecule and a nickel-molybdenumzinc alloy to form the hydrogen gas. Nocera reported his design in Science in September.

Sun Catalytix has claimed that the device could eventually produce a kilogram of hydrogen for about US $3. Nocera has also claimed that artificial leaves could enable people everywhere to live without being connected to a power grid.

But Nocera has a reputation for hyping his discoveries, which are often amplified by journalists and MIT's public relations office, according to a recent profile on Nocera in The New Yorker.

[Nocera] hasn't always rushed to correct mis-impressions, and at least some of this overselling has been intentional. Attracting funding for renewable-energy research requires showmanship...Nocera's challenge outside the laboratory has been to build enthusiasm for the artificial leaf even though, in anything like its current form, it is designed to meet a level of energy demand that by modern American standards is almost immeasurably low. 

In case you are feeling down about companies generating buzz for new renewable energy research and then abandoning the work, check out Hypersolar in Santa-Barbara, California, which is hanging tough and chronicling its progress in producing hydrogen gas from wastewater.

Photo Credit: American Chemical Society