The Hydrogen-Based Economy: Is it Enough to Paint Something Blue to Make it Green?

A hopeful image for a hopeful article by Bertrand Piccard. "Blue Hydrogen" seems to be popular, nowadays. But is it enough to paint something blue to make it green? It turns out that "green" hydrogen, assuming it exists, is too expensive for what we need to do now in order to move away from fossil fuels and stabilize Earth's climate.

Hydrogen has come a long way since the time when it was discovered by Henry Cavendish as a component of the water molecule in the 1700s and then given its name of “creator of water” by Henry Lavoisier in 1783. It was later discovered that hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe and the main component of stars.

Using hydrogen as a fuel is an old idea. It was, again, Cavendish who discovered that it can burn. The idea that hydrogen could be cycled as an energy storage medium is probably as old as the “fuel cell,” developed by William Grove in the early 1800s. In the 1950s and 1960s, the dream of "energy too cheap to meter" associated with nuclear technologies made it possible to think of hydrogen as an energy vector able to carry energy to the points of use, even vehicles, from a limited number of large nuclear plants. The first explicit mention of the concept of “hydrogen economy” was made by John Bockris in 1970. The nuclear promise never materialized, but the concept of the hydrogen economy was later linked to renewable energy. 

The idea of the hydrogen economy gained a lot of traction with the 2002 book by Jeremy Rifkin, titled “The Hydrogen Economy.” Conferences were held, research contracts were awarded, and prototypes were built. Sometimes, we saw lavishly illustrated pamphlets of the hydrogen-based world of the future, often depicted as something reminding the science fiction of the 1950s, except that it was quieter and greener. Then, it waned again when it became clear that the promises of clean prosperity could not be maintained except at stellar prices that no one was willing to pay. Today, we may be seeing a "third wave" of interest in the hydrogen economy. But is it a real possibility, or does it still remain in the domain of dreams?

Today, 50 years after the first mention of the concept of the hydrogen economy, and 20 years after Rifkin’s book, not a single application of the concept of cycling hydrogen as a fuel is present in the world’s economy. The “Hydrogen Car,” the fulcrum of the idea, found a recent incarnation in the form of the Toyota Mirai, but that’s hardly the kind of car that will replace conventional or battery-operated cars. After 6 years after having been introduced in the world market, there are maybe ten thousand Mirais running today in the world against some 10 million electric cars. Not a good performance for something that was touted to change the way people move in the world.

Things are not better for other facets of the hydrogen economy. Of all the prototype buses that would have used hydrogen as fuel, most can be found today in museums or have been scrapped – just a few seems to be still operational. The idea of using hydrogen as a large-scale storage system for the intermittent energy generated by renewable technology is too expensive to make sense. It simply doesn’t exist at present. We lack the network of hydrogen distribution stations envisaged as a necessity: there are maybe a hundred of them in Japan, maybe 30 in California. In the rest of the world, owning a Mirai is not a good idea. And nothing has happened of Rifkin’s grand idea that people would exchange hydrogen with each other using pipelines in the same way as people are exchanging data with each other using fiber optics cables.

In short, the hydrogen economy turned out to be 20 years (or even 50 years) of hype, but nothing that helped us to solve the problems that we face in terms of the desperate need we have to decarbonize the economy. It was at best a naïve idea. The costs and the problems involved were evident to everyone who looked at the matter in some depth.

What went wrong, then? A lot of things. Perhaps the main one was a basic misunderstanding in the way the idea was presented to the public. Free hydrogen is not an energy source; it is an energy carrier. Free hydrogen does not exist on this planet, so to create free hydrogen we must break the hydrogen bond in water molecules. That can be done using a technology carried electrolysis. It works, but it is not very efficient, it will always involve an energy loss that depends on various factors, but that is typically around 30%. So, hydrogen is a fuel, but it doesn’t come for free. You must pay for it and not so little. In practice, all the commercial hydrogen you buy today comes from the decomposition of natural gas, another process of limited efficiency. And that can’t help us much to get rid of fossil fuels since you start with a fossil fuel!

Then, there are lots of problems relative to how to store hydrogen. It is possible but expensive. Conventional steel tanks in which you store gaseous hydrogen suffer from the problem of embrittlement. Hydrogen atoms are so small that they diffuse into the steel making it fragile. You need different materials, typically more expensive ones. But, in any case, high-pressure hydrogen is not a good idea in terms of storage, especially in a vehicle. The tank would be huge, expensive, and dangerous. So, you can use cryogenic liquefied hydrogen that would still require a fuel tank of four times the size of a gasoline tank. In other words, a 30-liter tank of gasoline would be equivalent to a 120-liter tank of hydrogen. And you need to consider the energy needed to compress and liquefy the hydrogen, to say nothing of the unavoidable gradual loss from the tank, and from the danger that it poses. Hydrogen can leak from any container, no matter how well sealed it is. And liquid hydrogen will evaporate at a rate of around 2% per day.

Finally, there is a problem with the opposite side of the cycle, where you turn hydrogen back into water and energy. You can do that by burning hydrogen in a conventional thermal engine, but that’s so inefficient that it would make no sense. Indeed, the idea was, from the beginning, to use “fuel cells” – electrochemical devices that turn fuels into electric power. Fuel cells are normally efficient than thermal engines, but their efficiency is still limited, much lower than that of batteries. And fuel cells are expensive, the standard model that works at room temperature (PEM) need platinum as a catalyst at the electrodes. Platinum is a rare element, not only expensive, but that would be impossible to produce in amounts sufficient to replace even a fraction of the current park of road vehicles.

All that doesn’t mean that there are no niche applications of hydrogen that could be profitably used in the future. Maybe hydrogen could be a good fuel for ships, which have no problems with the need for a large and heavy tank. Or, hydrogen may be used for planes, although it would be impossible to couple with the current generation of planes that would need to be completely redesigned – not a task for the near future. And perhaps hydrogen could be used for large-scale energy storage. But all this is far away from the dreams of a prosperous and non-polluting hydrogen-based economy that were proposed in the early 2000s. 

All this is – or should be – known. Already in 2004, Joe Romm published a book titled “The Hydrogen Hype” directly conceived as a rebuttal of Rifkin’s 2002 book. Indeed, by the end of the first decade of the 20th century, the hydrogen economy seemed to be a dead duck. The collapse of the oil prices of 2009 and the advent of the apparently limitless “shale oil” in the US had convinced everyone that there were no problems with the oil supply for the near- and medium-term future. The idea of the hydrogen economy didn’t really die but went dormant, disappearing from the horizon of the energy events.

But, today, the situation has changed again. Depletion is making the extraction of fossil fuels more and more expensive. At the same time, we see the pressing need of decarbonizing the economy before it is too late to avoid a disastrous climate change. The fossil fuel industry is under heavy stress and the former miracle of shale oil is turning to be a canard. These are the probable reasons for the evident return of the hydrogen idea that we are witnessing today. It is not because new technologies made possible things that were not possible 20 years ago. It is, mostly a last attempt of the oil industry to propose a pie in the sky to retard the unavoidable demise of the polluting and unsustainable fossil fuels. The fossil lobby hopes that hydrogen will provide a niche for their products, counting on the fact that hydrogen – if we want it in large amounts – will have to come from fossil fuels for a long time. 

In short, hydrogen is not a good idea for the world of today. We need first to build up a real renewable infrastructure to produce energy. Only after that's accomplished, we could think of the luxury of using hydrogen to power cars and planes. For the time being, limited numbers of battery-powered vehicles, the concept of “smart grid,” and higher efficiency in every field, are the best way to go. We must move in that direction as soon as possible, without waiting for a pie in the sky that might never be within our reach.

 

Peak Uranium: the uncertain future of nuclear energy

 

Alice Friedmann recently posted on her blog "Energy Skeptic" a summary of the discussion on nuclear energy from my book "Extracted" (Chelsea Green, 2014). It is a well-done summary that I am reproducing here. Note that the text below mixes some of the considerations of the main text (written by me) and of one of the "glimpses"; that were written by other authors. The glimpse that reports the results of a model of future uranium production was written by Michael Dittmar. He told me in a recent mail exchange that his model seems to be doing pretty well more than two years after its results were published in "Extracted". (U.B.)

Peak Uranium by Ugo Bardi from "Extracted: How the Quest for Mineral Wealth Is Plundering the Planet"

Posted on January 11, 2017 by energyskeptic

 

Figure 1. cumulative uranium consumption by IPCC model 2015-2100 versus measured and inferred Uranium resources

[ Figure 1 shows that the next IPCC report counts very much on nuclear power to keep warming below 2.5 C.  The black line represents how many million tonnes of reasonably and inferred resources under $260 per kg remain (2016 IAEA redbook). Clearly most of the IPCC models are unrealistic.  The IPCC greatly exaggerates the amount of oil and coal reserves as well. Source: David Hughes (private communication)


This is an extract of Ugo Bardi’s must read “Extracted” about the limits of production of uranium. Many well-meaning citizens favor nuclear power because it doesn’t emit greenhouse gases.  The problem is that the Achilles heel of civilization is our dependency on trucks of all kinds, which run on diesel fuel because diesel engines transformed our civilization with their ability to do heavy work better than steam, gasoline, or any other kind of engine.  Trucks are required to keep the supply chains going that every person and business on earth require, from food to the materials and construction of the roads they run on, as well as mining, agriculture, construction trucks, logging etc. 

Nuclear power plants are not a solution, since trucks can’t run on electricity, so anything that generates electricity is not a solution, nor is it likely that the electric grid can ever be 100% renewable (read “When trucks stop running”, this can’t be explained in a sound-bite).  And we certainly aren’t going to be able to replace a billion trucks and equipment with diesel engines by the time the energy crunch hits with something else, there is nothing else.


Alice Friedemann   www.energyskeptic.com  author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report ]

Bardi, Ugo. 2014. Extracted: How the Quest for Mineral Wealth Is Plundering the Planet. Chelsea Green Publishing.

Although there is a rebirth of interest in nuclear energy, there is still a basic problem: uranium is a mineral resource that exists in finite amounts.

Even as early as the 1950s it was clear that the known uranium resources were not sufficient to fuel the “atomic age” for a period longer than a few decades.

That gave rise to the idea of “breeding” fissile plutonium fuel from the more abundant, non-fissile isotope 238 of uranium. It was a very ambitious idea: fuel the industrial system with an element that doesn’t exist in measurable amounts on Earth but would be created by humans expressly for their own purposes. The concept gave rise to dreams of a plutonium-based economy. This ambitious plan was never really put into practice, though, at least not in the form that was envisioned in the 1950s and ’60s. Several attempts were made to build breeder reactors in the 1970s, but the technology was found to be expensive, difficult to manage, and prone to failure. Besides, it posed unsolvable strategic problems in terms of the proliferation of fissile materials that could be used to build atomic weapons. The idea was thoroughly abandoned in the 1970s, when the US Senate enacted a law that forbade the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel.

A similar fate was encountered by another idea that involved “breeding” a nuclear fuel from a naturally existing element—thorium. The concept involved transforming the 232 isotope of thorium into the fissile 233 isotope of uranium, which then could be used as fuel for a nuclear reactor (or for nuclear warheads). The idea was discussed at length during the heydays of the nuclear industry, and it is still discussed today; but so far, nothing has come out of it and the nuclear industry is still based on mineral uranium as fuel.

Today, the production of uranium from mines is insufficient to fuel the existing nuclear reactors. The gap between supply and demand for mineral uranium has been as large as almost 50% from 1995 to 2005, though gradually reduced the past few years.

The U.S. mined 370,000 metric tons the past 50 years, peaking in 1981 at 17,000 tons/year.  Europe peaked in the 1990s after extracting 460,000 tons.  Today nearly all of the 21,000 ton/year needed to keep European nuclear plants operating is imported.

Table 1. The European mining cycle allows us to determine how much of the originally estimated uranium reserves could be extracted versus what actually happened before it cost too much to continue. Remarkably in all countries where mining has stopped it did so at well below initial estimates (50 to 70%). Therefore it’s likely ultimate production in South Africa and the United States can be predicted as well.

The Soviet Union and Canada each mined 450,000 tons. By 2010 global cumulative production was 2.5 million tons.  Of this, 2 million tons has been used, and the military had most of the remaining half a million tons.

The most recent data available show that mineral uranium accounts now for about 80% of the demand.  The gap is filled by uranium recovered from the stockpiles of the military industry and from the dismantling of old nuclear warheads.

This turning of swords into plows is surely a good idea, but old nuclear weapons and military stocks are a finite resource and cannot be seen as a definitive solution to the problem of insufficient supply. With the present stasis in uranium demand, it is possible that the production gap will be closed in a decade or so by increased mineral production. However, prospects are uncertain, as explained in “The End of Cheap Uranium.” In particular, if nuclear energy were to see a worldwide expansion, it is hard to see how mineral production could satisfy the increasing uranium demand, given the gigantic investments that would be needed, which are unlikely to be possible in the present economically challenging times.

At the same time, the effects of the 2011 incident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant are likely to negatively affect the prospects of growth for nuclear energy production, and with the concomitant reduced demand for uranium, the surviving reactors may have sufficient fuel to remain in operation for several decades.

It’s true that there are large quantities of uranium in the Earth’s crust, but there are limited numbers of deposits that are concentrated enough to be profitably mined. If we tried to extract those less concentrated deposits, the mining process would require far more energy than the mined uranium could ultimately produced [negative EROI].

Modeling Future Uranium Supplies

Table 2. Uranium supply and demand to 2030

Michael Dittmar used historical data for countries and single mines, to create a model that projected how much uranium will likely be extracted from existing reserves in the years to come. The model is purely empirical and is based on the assumption that mining companies, when planning the extraction profile of a deposit, project their operations to coincide with the average lifetime of the expensive equipment and infrastructure it takes to mine uranium—about a decade.

Gradually the extraction becomes more expensive as some equipment has to be replaced and the least costly resources are mined. As a consequence, both extraction and profits decline. Eventually, the company stops exploiting the deposit and the mine closes. The model depends on both geological and economic constraints, but the fact that it has turned out to be valid for so many past cases shows that it is a good approximation of reality.
This said, the model assumes the following points:

• Mine operators plan to operate the mine at a nearly constant production level on the basis of detailed geological studies and to manage extraction so that the plateau can be sustained for approximately 10 years.
• The total amount of extractable uranium is approximately the achieved (or planned) annual plateau value multiplied by 10.

Applying this model to well-documented mines in Canada and Australia, we arrive at amazingly correct results. For instance, in one case, the model predicted a total production of 319 ± 24 kilotons, which was very close to the 310 kilotons actually produced. So we can be reasonably confident that it can be applied to today’s larger currently operating and planned uranium mines.

Considering that the achieved plateau production from past operations was usually smaller than the one planned, this model probably overestimates the future production.

Table 2 summarizes the model’s predictions for future uranium production, comparing those findings against forecasts from other groups and against two different potential future nuclear scenarios.

As you can see, the forecasts obtained by this model indicate substantial supply constraints in the coming decades—a considerably different picture from that presented by the other models, which predict larger supplies.

The WNA’s 2009 forecast differs from our model mainly by assuming that existing and future mines will have a lifetime of at least 20 years. As a result, the WNA predicts a production peak of 85 kilotons/year around the year 2025, about 10 years later than in the present model, followed by a steep decline to about 70 kilotons/year in 2030. Despite being relatively optimistic, the forecast by the WNA shows that the uranium production in 2030 would not be higher than it is now. In any case, the long deposit lifetime in the WNA model is inconsistent with the data from past uranium mines. The 2006 estimate from the EWG was based on the Red Book 2005 RAR (reasonably assured resources) and IR (inferred resources) numbers. The EWG calculated an upper production limit based on the assumption that extraction can be increased according to demand until half of the RAR or at most half of the sum of the RAR and IR resources are used. That led the group to estimate a production peak around the year 2025.

Assuming all planned uranium mines are opened, annual mining will increase from 54,000 tons/year to a maximum of 58 (+ or – 4) thousand tons/year in 2015. [ Bardi wrote this before 2013 and 2014 figures were known. 2013 was 59,673 (highest total) and 56,252 in 2014.]

Declining uranium production will make it impossible to obtain a significant increase in electrical power from nuclear plants in the coming decades.

How renewables can beat nuclear

Truly impressive what you can do with Google's "Ngram Viewer"! The graph above doesn't mean that renewables are the perfect energy source, but it surely means that the interest in renewable energy is growing. Actually, it is exploding. And this is a good thing for our future.

The oil crash: something wicked this way comes

The recent oil price crash signals the impending demise of the oil and gas industry as a major world energy producer. That should be a good thing, in principle, but something wicked may still come out of the process.

With the ongoing collapse of the oil prices, we can say that it is game over for the oil and gas industry, in particular for the production of "tight" (or "shale") oil and gas. Prices may still go back to reasonably high levels, in the future, but the industry will never be able to regain the momentum that had made its US  supporters claim "energy independence" and "centuries of abundance." The bubble may not burst all of a sudden, but it surely will deflate.

So, what's going to happen, now? The situation is, to say the least, "fluid". A great rush is ongoing to convince investors to place their money where there is still some chance to make a profit. I think we can identify at least three different strategies for the future: 1) more of the same (oil and gas) 2) a push to nuclear, and 3) a push for renewables. Let's see to examine what the future may have in store for us.


1) A push for more gas and more oil. The oil&gas industry has not yet conceded defeat; on the contrary, it still dreams of centuries of abundance (see, e.g. this article on Forbes). It seems unthinkable that investors would still want to finance uncertain enterprises such as squeezing more oil from exhausted fields or, worse, from difficult and expensive technologies such as coal liquefaction. But you should never underestimate the power of business as usual. If people feel that they absolutely need liquid fuels, then they will be willing to do anything to get liquid fuels.

The main problem with this idea is not so much its technical feasibility. By throwing every resource at hand at the task (and beggaring the whole economy in the process) it would not be impossible to fool peak oil for a few more years. The problem is a different one: it is with climate change and with the fact that we are running out of time. If we keep burning hydrocarbons, we just can't make it: the industrial society cannot survive the resulting warming and the associated troubles. That is true if we keep burning at the "natural" rate, that is along the bell shaped curve. Imagine if we try to keep growing, instead (as all politicians in the world say we should).

All this is becoming well known and, as a result, a push toward further hydrocarbon production (or, God forbid, more coal) will be possible only if accompanied by a strong propaganda campaign destined to silence climate science and climate activism. Some symptoms that something like that is in the making are evident enough to be disturbing. Consider that none of the Republican candidates for the US 2016 elections supports the need for action on climate change, that in Florida government employees are not allowed to use the term "climate change" or "global warming," that NASA has been defunded on anything that has to do with climate change, and more. Then, a certain logic starts to appear: "muzzle the science and keep on burning". Something very wicked this way comes.....


2. A new push for nuclear. This option would not be so bad as the first, more hydrocarbons. At least, nuclear plants do not directly generate greenhouse gases and we know that it is a technology that can produce energy. Nevertheless, the hurdles associated with its expansion are gigantic. The first and foremost problem is that the uranium mineral production is not sufficient for ramping up nuclear energy from a few percent of the world's primary energy production to a major fraction of it - to be able to do that would require investments so large to be mind boggling. To say nothing about the need for rare minerals in nuclear plants: beryllium, niobium, hafnium, zirconium, rare earths, and more; all in short supply. Then, there are all the nightmarish problems of nuclear waste disposal, safety, and strategic control.

Nevertheless, if it were possible to convince investors to pour money into nuclear energy, then it would be possible to see an attempt to restart it, despite the various problems and disasters that have given to nuclear a bad name. An attempt to do just that seems to be in progress. President Obama is said to be considering a massive return to nuclear and investors are told to prepare for a gigantic surge in uranium prices. Will it work? Unlikely, but not impossible. Something wicked this way comes......

hafnium as a neutron absorber, beryllium as a neutron reflector, zirconium for cladding, and niobium

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2011-05-nuclear-power-world-energy.html#jCp

3. A big push for renewables. Surprisingly, the renewable industry may have serious chances to take over from a senescent oil industry, leaving the nuclear industry standing still and gasping at the sight. The progress in renewable technology, especially in photovoltaic cells, has been simply fantastic during the past decade (see, e.g., the recent MIT report). We have now a set of methods for producing electric power that can compete with traditional sources, watt for watt, dollar for dollar. Consider that the most efficient of these technologies do not need critically rare materials and that none brings the strategic and security problem of nuclear. Finally, consider that it has been shown (Sgouridis, Bardi, and Csala) that the present renewable technology could take over from the current sources fast enough to prevent major damage from climate change.

It looks like we have a winner, right? Indeed, the atmosphere around renewables is one of palpable optimism. If renewable energy picks up enough momentum, there will be nothing able to stop it until it has catapulted all of us, willing or not, into a new (and cleaner) world.

There is a problem, though. The renewable industry is still tiny in comparison to the nuclear industry and especially in comparison to the oil and gas industry. And we know that might usually wins against right. The sheer financial power of the traditional energy industry may well be enough to abort the change before it becomes unstoppable. Something wicked may still come....... (*)





(*) "Something wicked this way comes" is mainly known today as the title of a 1962 novel by Ray Bradbury. Actually, it comes from Shakespeare's Macbeth..

Lessons from a failed energy revolution: the real reasons of the nuclear failure

(Image from global warming art). In this post, I argue that nuclear energy ceased to be a viable option in the world's energy mix as the result of the disappearance of the subsidies it received in the form of plutonium purchases by the military. This event was accompanied by a demonization campaign that forever destroyed the reputation of nuclear energy as an environmentally benign technology. In this story, there are several points of contact with the present situation with renewables, targeted by a demonization campaign destined to prolong the agony of fossil fuels. (note, this post was slightly modified on Aug 2014 in response to requests to clarify that the civilian nuclear industry never "sold" plutonium to the military. This was clear to the author from the beginning, but the way the older version was written could generate some misunderstandings)

So far, no energy transition has been planned or managed in advance. Moving, for instance, from wood to coal or from coal to oil was the result of price mechanisms which made the transition convenient for everybody. There never was any need for governments to subsidize diesel locomotives to replace steam ones.

Today, we are going through a new energy transition, one that will take us from fossil fuels to renewable energy. The problem is that price mechanisms, alone, may not be sufficient to drive the transition fast enough. Hence, many governments have enacted rules and created incentives designed to favor renewable energy. These measures have been successful in promoting the growth or renewables, but, right now, the incentives are under attack everywhere in a situation of increasing competition for ever diminishing resources. So, the transition is at risk.

As it is often the case, the past can be a guide for the future and we can learn something by looking at a past case of a failed energy revolution: nuclear energy. This story is worth retelling today because of the many points which are starting to appear surprisingly similar to the present situation with renewables.

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The nuclear industry started, literally, with a bang; with the first nuclear bomb of Alamogordo in 1945. But nuclear reactors are older than that. The Alamogordo warhead used plutonium produced by the first nuclear reactor in history, the "Chicago Pile" which had started operating in 1942. It had been built exclusively to produce plutonium for military purposes, just as the other reactors built during the same period. These early reactors generated a lot of waste heat and it was soon clear that this heat could be used to produce electric power. That was the origin of the concept of "atoms for peace", popular in the 1950s.

In the mid 1950s, the first commercial reactors for the production of electric power appeared and, subsequently, nuclear energy production grew rapidly, to the point that it seemed possible to create an energy system based entirely on nuclear sources, at least for the production of electricity. It was a moment of great optimism and the age of electricity "too cheap to meter" really seemed to be around the corner.

But, in the 1970s, something happened that brought the expansion of the nuclear industry to a screeching halt. From the mid 1980s onward, the number of new reactors has been barely sufficient to replace the old ones, with the total production of nuclear energy slowing down its growth and showing a decline during the past few years (image on the right from Wikipedia). The nuclear industry failed its objective of becoming the world's main source of electric power; a market that was instead kept by fossil fuels; in particular by coal.


Various interpretations have been proposed to explain the decline of nuclear energy. Often, several different causes are said to have acted together as you can read, for instance, in "Ten Blows that stopped nuclear power." By far, however, the most popular interpretation seems to be that the nuclear industry was killed by the growing environmental movement. It is an interpretation that pleases both nuclearists (it gives them someone to blame) and environmentalists (who see themselves as a powerful force in the issue).

These explanations make some sense. But do you really believe that as many as ten causes all acted in the same direction to explain such a clear trend as the nearly complete stop to the construction of new reactors? And do you really think that the environmental movement could have such a success in bringing on its knees a supposedly healthy industry, considering the success that the same movement is now having, for instance, in stopping the emissions of greenhouse gases from coal plants?

Rather, I propose here that there is a clear single cause that brought nuclear power on its knees in the 1970s. It was, simply, that nuclear energy stopped being subsidized by the US government. At that point, building new plants became unprofitable and the expansion of nuclear power stopped.

The question of the subsidies needs some explanation, because the nuclear industry often claims it needs none. A list of subsidies is given in the 2011 report by Doug Koplow, who, however, seems to have missed what was probably the historically most important subsidy to the Western nuclear industry: the production of plutonium for the US military to be used for military weapons. This market was probably of the same order of magnitude as that resulting from the sales of electricity (for an estimate of the budget involved, see note at the end of this post)

With the expansion of nuclear power, the production of plutonium increased in proportion. But, in 1977, the US senate approved a law forbidding the reprocessing of spent fuel from nuclear plants nuclear plants to produce plutonium. In a sense, it was a badly needed decision, since the growing production of plutonium was creating an economic and strategic disaster. The risk of nuclear proliferation increased with the amount of plutonium produced and the number of warheads in the US and in the URSS military systems was growing out of control with more than 30,000 nuclear stockpiled in the US alone. That gave to the concept of "overkill" a whole new meaning (image source). Apart from the strategic problems it created, plutonium purchasing was also a considerable financial burden for the US government, at that time in a serious financial difficulties generated by the ongoing oil crisis.


The disappearance of the market for plutonium reprocessing was a major blow to the nuclear industry. Not so much in purely economic terms, because the civilian nuclear energy never could produce plutonium - they were not equipped for this purpose. But it cast a general doubt on the financing of new plants since the original market for which they had been developed - military plutonium - had disappeared. As a result, in the tight financial moment of the late 1970s, it became nearly impossible to find the resources to pay for new nuclear plants. Coal plants could produce higher revenues at smaller initial costs and it is there that investments in energy production were directed. In a sense, we can say that the nuclear industry was a victim of the crisis of the industry that it was supposed to replace: the fossil fuel industry.

The (apparent) end of the oil crisis in the second half of the 1980s eased the world's financial situation, but it didn't help the nuclear industry, which had failed in developing lower cost technologies and still couldn't compete with fossils at the low prices of that period. The new crisis of the first decade of the 21st century reversed again the trend. Today, we see new claims about the need of going nuclear and some evidence of new nuclear plants being programmed. But this nuclear renaissance is slow to start and it may do little more than replace the obsolete plants which badly need to be scrapped.

An interesting point in this story is how stop to the nuclear subsidies was accompanied by the demonization the nuclear industry.  Up to the early 1970s, environmentalists had been generally neutral and often favorable to nuclear energy. Afterward, instead, the tide turned decisively against nuclear energy, with the fortunate slogan "Nuclear? No thanks" created in 1975. We have no evidence that the anti-nuclear campaign was masterminded by some secret agency (but it cannot be ruled out, either). What we can say is that the campaign was extremely effective and in turning nuclear power into the absolute bugaboo of all environmentalists.

 _______________________________


Now, let's move forward to our times and let's look at the situation of renewable energy. The similarities with the story of the nuclear industry stand out clearly. The renewable industry enjoys significant subsidies from governments and grew rapidly to production levels comparable to those of the nuclear industry.  Whereas nuclear subsidies were generated mainly by military needs, subsidies to renewables have been generated by the perception of the horrendous external costs of both fossil and nuclear energy. In the first case (fossils) mainly in terms of climate change, in the second (nuclear) in terms of proliferation, contamination, etc.

The problem with external costs, however, is that they are paid by the whole community while the profits of the activities generating them go only to the owners of the plants. Hence, when subsidies or "internalization" start to bite on profits, fossil lobbies will start fighting back. One of the ways they have to undermine public support for renewables is to use demonization campaigns in the media. These campaigns are especially evident in wind power, but also for photovoltaic power and other clean energy technologies. It seems that this approach is starting to pay off for the fossil lobby. Today, a significant fraction of the environmental movement seems to be considering renewable energy almost as evil as nuclear energy. 
 
We are not yet to the point to see the diffusion of slogans such as "Photovoltaics? No thanks" but never underestimate the power of media and the gullibility of people. PR campaigns tend to generate entrenched legends which, in the long run, are extremely difficult to dislodge from the collective perception. We have examples of this behavior with the demonization of the study "The Limits to Growth" of 1972 and, today, with the demonization of climate science. There is a real risk that a well financed negative PR campaign coupled with punitive financial measures could reduce the renewable industry to something similar to what the nuclear industry is today: obsolete plants and old men reminiscing of past glories.


But the transition to renewable energy is the only hope we have to overcome the resource crisis and the climate crisis we are facing. Renewable energy is showing rapid progress: costs are going down, efficiency is increasing, and new solutions for energy storage are being developed. Renewable energy is now a credible competitor for fossil fuels even without subsidies and it needs not suffer the same failure of nuclear energy. But we need to watch out for a last ditch attempt of the fossil lobby to get rid of a competitor by lies and slandering. We need to keep the momentum for the transition to a better world. And to keep it, we must fight for it.


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Note: plutonium and the nuclear industry. 

I haven't been able to find data on how much money the military paid for the plutonium they used for nuclear warheads during the 1960s and 1970s. Maybe it is still a military secret, but we can at least make a rough estimation.

First of all, the total amount of plutonium produced for the US military alone is of some 111 metric tons (source). Since plutonium does not exist in the Earth's crust, all of it must have been created in nuclear reactors. How much is this plutonium worth? At present prices, plutonium is said to be worth something between 1000 and 5000 $/g (source). So, all the plutonium stored by the US military is worth something of the order of 100 - 500 billion dollars. No peanuts, indeed  Now, consider that this sum was paid in an arc of time of about 20 years and that today the nuclear industry in the US sells about 40-50 billion dollars of electric power (source). We see, therefore, that the subsidy to nuclear energy coming from the sales of plutonium was very significant.

Let's try another approach. A 1 GW nuclear plant was reported in 1976 to generate something like 250 kg of plutonium per year (source). At today's prices, that could be worth between 250 million dollars and one billion dollars. According to the data available (source) a total nuclear capacity of 100 GW in the US generated 790 million MWh, that is, about 8 million/MWh per GW of nominal power. Let's take a value of 50 $/MWh (source), it follows that a 1 GW nuclear reactor generates revenues for 400 million dollars per year. Again, we see that the plutonium produced by the reactor  worth a significant fraction of the revenue from electricity sales, perhaps even more than that!

Of course, these data are obtained using the present plutonium prices; at the time, prices were surely different. And note also that the civilian nuclear industry never could  "sell" plutonium to the military - they couldn't do that because they lacked the facilities to extract and refine plutonium (of the right isotopic composition) from their spent fuel. They just provided their spent fuel rods to specialized plants which would extract and refine plutonium 239 which then was transformed into weapons or stockpiled. The calculation is just an estimate of the value of the plutonium production during the heydays of the nuclear industry, and that must have provided a significant benefit to the industry.

The question of Sovicille

Image above by Martin

My job often casts me the role of public speaker and that gives me a chance to visit very interesting places. Not long ago, I gave a talk in the small town of Sovicille, near Siena, in the beautiful countryside of central Tuscany. At this presentation, a member of the audience posed a question that gave me the occasion to elaborate on something that I had been thinking on for a while; that is, about why there is so much disagreement on so many issues, from resource depletion to climate change. In theory, the scientific method should lead us to find an agreement, in practice we seem to be engaged in an endless cycle of arguments that never goes anywhere. Why is it so? What follows is related from memory, but it is close to the actual debate of that evening. 

The question:


Professor, I liked your talk, but I am perplexed. You told us many interesting things about fossil fuels, energy and climate. I tend to agree with you and your conclusions seem to make sense. But I can't avoid noticing that I have heard other scientists arriving to different conclusions. I heard someone saying that people were predicting the end of fossil fuels already 20 years ago and they were wrong, of course, and therefore there is nothing to worry about today. And it is the same about climate; I heard someone saying that scientists were expecting an ice age in the 1970s, and they were wrong, of course. So, I am surprised that experts can have such different positions while, theoretically, they all have the same data. You see, professor, I used to teach philosophy in high school and I know that there are different philosophical schools and different ideas. And, of course, when we discuss religion or politics, people have different ideas and there is no way that one can demonstrate who is right and who is wrong. That is normal. But I expected that in science things would be different. So, why is that?

My answer:

First of all, thanks a lot for this question. It is a very interesting problem that goes to the core of the matter and perhaps it is funny that I had to come all the way to Sovicille to discuss this subject. So, you are right in noting that there is something wrong with the debate on many important issues, from resource depletion to climate change. We discuss and discuss and we don't seem to be going anywhere; people just remain entrenched in their positions. This is surprising under many respects because we are not discussing religion - these issues are not based on dogmas or on divine revelations. We have data and we have the scientific method that tells us how to interpret them. We should arrive to an agreement or, at least, to identify the areas of uncertainty. But, for some reason, it doesn't work that way. So, is this a failure of scientists, of the scientific method, or of what?

One thing that I can tell you is that I am often amazed to see how well the scientific method works. I'd say wonderfully well. There is the agreement that facts are the basis of consensus. Then, if new facts challenge the old view, well, the old view is abandoned. There are many cases in the history of science when at some moment there was some consensus on a wrong idea. But science always found the right course when new and better data became available. The scientific discussion may be harsh, tempers may flare - scientists are human beings, after all - but, in the end, it finds the right way. One of the beautiful things of science is that there is no humiliation involved in changing your mind. You have new data, you change your interpretation and nobody says that you are a flip-flop.

You see, the essence of the scientific method is about managing uncertainty. You want to reduce it as much as possible, but never exactly to zero. You want to leave always open the possibility to review and change even the most strongly established ideas. That is a bit subtle - many people don't understand it. That's very evident in an issue such as anthropogenic climate change, AGW. If you say that there remains a certain degree of uncertainty about AGW, then some people will tell you that, if it is uncertain, there is no need to do anything about it. But if you tell them that you are sure that AGW is real, then they tell you that you are not a good scientist, because a good scientist should know that in science nothing ever is absolutely certain. A nice trick to make sure that the debate never goes anywhere. 

So, this beauty of the scientific method is also, in a way, a problem. Because of the uncertainty that is supposed to remain in any issue, there is always a possibility to argue just about anything. Sure, it would be weird today to seriously argue that the Earth is flat, even though I think there is, somewhere, a "flat earth society." But other subjects, and I was mentioning resource depletion and climate change, are uncertain enough that there is plenty of space to argue. Which is fine, in principle; the problem is that the discussion should be about reducing this uncertainty, whereas some people seem to be interested only in keeping it as large as possible; if possible in enlarging it. And some people engaged in this task are scientists; and that is bad because the have the cultural resources to keep arguing and arguing and always stay away from a conclusion. This is, in a way, human, but you wouldn't expect this attitude from people trained as scientists. So, I think this is the core of your question and let's see if we can answer it.

One first hypothesis is that people take this attitude because of money. Maybe you heard that say which has that, "you can't expect someone to understand something if his or her salary depends on not understanding it." That sounds wise and it raises a question: can we explain the behavior of some scientists with corruption? Money corrupts, as we all know, and scientists are human beings. You probably read in the newspapers not long ago that the vote of an Italian senator can be bought for couple of hundred thousand dollars. I don't know if that is true but I am afraid it might. And if a senator can be bought for two hundred thousand dollars, why not a scientist, who makes much less money than a senator?

Indeed, scientists can be bought and have been bought, at least occasionally. There is a good book that you can read on this point; it is titled "Merchants of Doubt." It is written by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway. It tells you, among other things, of the debate about the effect of smoking on people's health and how some scientists were on the payroll of the tobacco industry. That is, they were paid to lie to people telling them that smoking is not bad for health. And you can read in the same book how, later on, some of these scientists moved on to work for fossil fuel companies and they were paid to cast doubts on the science of climate change. We can call these people "scientists" and, unfortunately, some of them have the right credential to claim to be that. Scientists, maybe, but also criminals of the worst kind. They kill people for money. Money corrupts, as I said.

But let me say that there are very few corrupt scientists in the sense of being paid money to tell lies. You can see that because, in the end, the tobacco industry lost the battle on the health effects of smoking. If it were easy to buy scientists, the tobacco industry could have bought enough scientists to build a totally different consensus. By now, we would be all convinced that smoking is good for health; we would be all smoking right now! So, it seems to be very difficult to buy a scientist for money; it may be much more difficult than buying an Italian senator. And that makes me happy because I am a scientist and not a senator; but, of course, this is not the point we are discussing.

So, scientists are not - normally - corrupt, in the sense that they are paid money for telling lies. But there is still a problem related with money: many scientists are "embedded" in the industrial system. It doesn't mean that they get money in their pockets directly from industry. But to be a good scientist one must do research and doing research costs money. Suppose you are a scientist who works on petroleum. Suppose you have been involved in estimating oil resources and making scenarios for future production. Then you discover that peak oil is real and coming soon - that is, production will start declining in the near future. But these are not good news for the industry. You know, if peak oil is really coming soon, people might decide to stop investing in oil and invest in renewable energy, instead. That would be horrible news for the oil industry and surely it is hard to think that you would get a grant from an oil company to publish such results. Without grants, no research. Without research, no career. The life of the whistle-blower is difficult, as everyone knows.

So, you see, in the end money counts; as we all know. But I think this is not the whole story - there are factors that go beyond money in determining the behavior of people. Let me make another example. You may have heard of Freeman Dyson, he is a famous physicist. He wrote an interesting book where he tells of his experience in working with the British Bomber Command during the second world war. The task of Bomber Command was to carry out bombing raids against Germany and Dyson reports that he found himself working for a huge organization dedicated to killing people and not even doing the job well. But he could not disengage himself: he describes how he slowly retreated from one moral position to another until he had no moral position at all. The problem was that he felt that it was morally right to fight that war, but he found that, step by step, that moral stance led him to a position in which he was embedded with Bomber Command and because of that he found himself inventing justifications for burning alive German men, women and children. And, of course, on the other side there were surely people who were trying to find moral justifications for exterminating Jewish men, women and children. If people were unable to twist their morals in this way, nobody ever would fight wars.

In modern times, this mechanism, let's call it the "embedding trap" works just as well. It is for this reason that you rarely find a scientist working or doing research for the coal industry who is also active in promoting the need of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. That doesn't mean that the scientists working for the coal industry are evil or corrupt, just that they are human beings, just as we are. The insidious power of the embedding trap lies in the fact that it proceeds step by step towards a certain direction and the embedded person may not even realize that. There are many people denying AGW, scientists or not, who don't work for the coal industry and are not paid by the fossil fuel lobby. They are just embedded in an environment of like-minded persons who have led them to take positions from which they can't back off any more.

This is a major problem. As long as the situation stays as it is, there will always people who will exploit the natural uncertainty of science to bend or ignore facts and find "scientific" arguments against inconvenient truths, such as climate change and resource depletion. So, how do we beat the embedding trap?

This is a good question, again. My impression is that there have to be ways to avoid the trap. The main one is not to fall into it from the very beginning. I believe you can do first of all by sticking to the scientific method. But perhaps it is more important to use that quality that I could call "empathy". In order to avoid the embedding trap, you have to have a certain "feeling" about the world, the people, nature, everything. If you feel empathy towards your fellow human beings it is much more difficult to think that you'll find yourself justifying killing large numbers of them by carpet bombing or by the emissions of coal plants. But you have to avoid the trap from the beginning. If you fall into the embedding trap, it is extremely difficult to come out


I do think that it is possible to avoid the trap. When I read that 97% of climate scientists support real science in the face threats, intimidation, ridicule and legal harassment, well, that makes me proud of being a scientist or, at least, to be doing what I can to be one. So, I think that, as long as we stick to the scientific method, as scientists we'll always have something to say that is useful to the world and I believe that the world will have a good reason to trust us. So, there is hope to advance even in the face of the difficulties we face today.

In the end, there are many things that money can't buy - one is the Tuscan landscape around us and the kind of life that one can live here; even without a lot of money. And, perhaps, if we look at that, we can understand what I meant as "empathy" for nature and for human beings and that is a good way to avoid the embedding trap.



I wish to thank Marco Rustioni and Alfredo Camozzi for having invited me to speak in Sovicille in March 2011

Italy kills the nuclear demon

The result of the Italian national referendum on nuclear energy are out. As I am writing, the data are not yet official, but it seems certain that the votes against nuclear energy were about 95% of the total (*). A landslide, if ever there was one! It is a disaster for the nuclear industry that is sure to have consequences on nuclear policy even outside Italy.

There will be time for a detailed analysis of the vote, for political considerations, and for thinking of future scenarios. One thing is certain, however: nuclear energy has come a long way from the time, half a century ago, when it was hailed as the solution to all of humankind's problems.

The debate on this referendum was extremely polarized from the beginning. Mostly, detractors presented nuclear energy as dangerous and unreliable and voters seem to have seen the problem in these terms. The choice was seen as black and white, good vs. evil, demons against angels.

But, if the downfall of nuclear energy generates the return of coal as a replacement, then who is the demon and who is the angel is a debatable point.


(*) Final results: Against nukes: 94.1%, for nukes: 5.9%

Italy's nuclear rollercoaster: the government scraps nuclear energy for the second time

Italy is a curious country for many reasons. One is its attitude towards nuclear energy, that has been going up and down in the government's programs like a true rollercoaster.

Back in the 1960s, Italy had an ambitious nuclear program; one of the most advanced in the world. Then, something happened in the 1970s that made the nuclear industry the target of some powerful political forces. After a struggle that lasted about a decade, nuclear energy in Italy was officially killed by a popular referendum that took place in 1987. In the 1990s, Italy was the only country in the world that dismantled perfectly functioning nuclear plants.

In the 2000s, the pendulum swung in the opposite direction. In 2008, Mr. Berlusconi's party won the national elections and rapidly embarked in a new nuclear program that involved building at least four nuclear plants and perhaps four more. And now, suddenly, the plan has been shelved again by a new bill that scraps all the previous decrees on nuclear energy.

The reason for this sudden policy reversal is commonly said to be related to the need to avoid the popular referendum on nuclear energy set for June of this year. After the Fukushima disaster, it is almost certain that the referendum would have resulted in the defeat of the government's nuclear plans. But there may have been other reasons; in particular the high cost of the plan that had been recently declared to be "too expensive" by the Italian finance minister, Mr. Tremonti.

So, Italy has been a true rollercoaster for nuclear energy: killed by law at least two times in a few decades; surely a unique case in the world. But are we seeing now the final demise of the idea of nuclear plants in Italy? Perhaps not: the recent government decree may simply be a stop to nuclear energy, not its definitive disappearance. After the effect of the Fukushima disaster is over, it is not impossible that we'll see the government's nuclear rollercoaster restarting its ride. Italy is a curious country, indeed.

Tricking the Atomic Genie

Italian Version

This 1957 video by Walt Disney was produced in parallel with a book titled "Our friend, the atom."  It was translated into Italian and I perfectly remember having read it when I was, maybe, ten years old. Still today, half a century later, the imagery of the book is with me. When I think of atoms, electrons are blue and protons red, as they were drawn in that book.

"Our friend, the atom" was full of optimism and of hope for the wealth and prosperity that the atomic age would bring to us. It is a shock, today, to look back to those times and realize how much it had been promised and how little was actually delivered. Go to minute 4:40 of the film and watch the story of the Fisherman and the Genie. How naive it was to think that we could trick nature so easily! Our greatest mistake has always been to think that we are smarter than nature.




The clip shown here is the first of a 5-parts series. To see the whole movie, go to http://www1.teachertube.com/ and type "our friend the atom" in the search box. Clip n. 5 is especially interesting as it shows animations of what were thought to be the actual benefits that atomic energy would bring to us.