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Any Green New Deal Is Dead Without Nuclear Power

This article is more than 5 years old.

Al Drago/Bloomberg

Congressional members rolled out their "Green New Deal" in February that calls for a rapid shift to carbon-free energy. As laid out by Representative Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Senator Markey (D-MA), the Deal calls for some drastic measures to cut carbon emissions across the economy, from electricity generation to transportation to agriculture to building efficiencies.

But the roll-out hiccupped a bit on the role of nuclear energy.

At first, the proposal called for phasing out all nuclear plants and not building any new ones. They also released a fact sheet nixing the possibility of building new nuclear power plants. Then they backed off and referred to future energy sources as clean, renewable, and zero-emission, which allows nuclear in.

But every true expert on this subject knows we need all non-fossil fuel energy sources, including nuclear, in order to reduce our carbon emissions in time to reign in the worst effects of global warming.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the International Energy Agency, the UN Sustainable Solutions Network and the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate argue for a tripling of nuclear energy, requiring over 1,000 new reactors (10,000 SMRs) to stabilize global carbon emissions.

Even more persuasive, four of the world’s top climate scientists, Dr. James Hansen, Dr. Tom Wigley, Dr. Ken Caldeira and Dr. Kerry Emanuel, have shown that renewables alone cannot meet the goal of decarbonizing the world economy.

The four scientists outlined how only a combined strategy of employing all the major sustainable clean energy options, including renewables and nuclear, and efficiency and conservation, can prevent the worst effects of climate change by the end of this century.

Even the Union of Concerned Scientists recenty said we need nuclear to address global warming.

NuScale

Although everyone has focused on the Green in the Green New Deal, it really is as much about the New Deal part - the social issues of economic equality, jobs and social nets - as in updating Roosevelt’s original New Deal that brought us out of the Great Depression. The Green New Deal aims to create jobs and boost the economy, rework our farming practices, and provide living wages, family leave, and health care for all.

These last issues are arguably more daunting, more powerful and more costly than the Green part since energy is the cheapest its ever been in the history of humanity and over the long term, they all cost about the same.

But most discussions have focused on the Green part. Ocasio-Cortez has stated that we should go carbon-neutral in 10 years. While that is not scientifically possible, it is the type of goal that needs to be set in order to make any difference at all in the time frame we have, which is about 20 years.

The Green New Deal says all the right things:

- upgrading all existing buildings in the country for energy efficiency

- working with farmers to eliminate pollution and greenhouse gas emissions as much as is technologically feasible, while supporting family farms and promoting universal access to healthy food

- overhauling transportation systems to reduce emissions including expanding electric car manufacturing, building charging stations everywhere, and expanding high-speed rail to a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary

- a guaranteed job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations and retirement security for every American

- high-quality health care for all Americans.

So let’s put some numbers to this. Presently, America is 64% fossil fuel in electricity generation, but 87% fossil fuel if you add in transportation which is dominated by petroleum. We are dominated by fossil fuel.

After 14 years of dropping because as we replaced coal plants with gas plants, our carbon emissions began to rise again in 2018 because of increased gasoline and diesel use.

It took us 70 years to get to this point, so completely changing it in 20 years is a big, big lift.

The only energy plan for generation that has any hope of achieving any of the goals we need, in the time frame we need them, is the following:

- stop building any new fossil fuel plants.

- stop closing existing nuclear power plants that have been relicensed as safe by the NRC, which is almost all remaining reactors in the United States. Crying that a penny a kWh is just too much for America to bear is insane under the urgent need to decarbonize. And everytime we close nuclear carbon emissions go up.

- build as many wind turbines as possible and site them along Tornado Alley first, where they produce the most power. Putting them most anywhere else is self-defeating and wastes steel.

- put rooftop solar on all new buildings, first in areas that average at least 200 sunny days per year.

- build new small modular reactors as fast as possible to load-follow, or buffer, the renewables, instead of building new natural gas plants. SMRs cannot melt down and all the other scary things have been fixed. We haven't been idle in the last 30 years.

- follow the new plan by the National Hydropower Association and the Department of Energy, to double hydropower over the next few decades, adding 60 GW by 2030, without building a single new dam. As it turns out, only 3% of American dams generate electricity, so electrifying existing dams that presently do not produce power, uprating the others to produce more power, and emplacing pumped-hydro storage will do a lot.

- secure sources of Li, Co, Fe and other metals needed to build the alternatives, especially to build the batteries for enough fully electric vehicles to replace oil.

- build a fleet of 150 million fully electric vehicles by 2040 that will significantly reduce our use of oil - much fewer will not sufficiently drop our consumption – and place 100,000 charging stations along all roadways that will be able to service such a national fleet.

- streamline the process to site and approve high-voltage transmission lines. We cannot install this many renewables without them. And make the grid “smart.” Simple but costly.

Army Corps of Engineers

In America, this plan will require over 200 new nuclear reactors (or 2,000 small modular reactors that are especially ideal for load-following renewables), 500,000 additional MW wind turbines, 800 billion kWhs from new solar, and 600 billion kWhs from hydro.

We should certainly pursue other alternatives like tidal and wave energy as fast as possible but they will not be developed enough to contribute much by 2040.

The nuclear and hydro are needed, in place of natural gas, for baseload power and to load-follow the enormous amount of renewables.

We will need to keep those natural gas plants that have been built after 2000 as they are needed for flexibility until we build enough nuclear and hydro. But we need to stop building new gas plants. This is probably the most difficult thing to achieve as regulators, state legislators, and banks love them.

Natural gas has long been touted as a bridge fuel to a non-fossil future beyond this century. But that is nonsense. We don't have a century. And if so many new gas plants are built, especially to load-follow wind and solar, then we lock ourselves into gas for a long, long time. No one is going to decommission or destroy a relatively new gas plant.

On the other hand, gas plants can be refurbished to small modular reactors relatively easily, just as coal plants can be refurbished to gas plants relatively easily.

It should be noted that we have more natural gas than any country in the world, and gas plants are so easy to build and maintain. For that matter, we have more oil and coal than any country in the world, which makes any non-fossil plan extremely difficult.

Conca

The amount of wind and solar required by this plan needs to be put into perspective. We presently have about 90,000 MW of wind turbines that generate about 260 billion kWhs per year, and we have been building them as fast as possible for over ten years.

To build 500,000 more MW of turbines over the next 10 to 20 years, is really pushing our manufacturing side and will take more steel than we could possible produce over that time frame. Wind turbines take 450 tons of steel per MW. Solar takes 300 tons of steel per MW. We would be very dependent on China, India and Japan for that much steel, and would depend on them to either produce more, or use less.

Given our track record with huge global economic agreements, I’m a little leery.

So as we discuss the Green New Deal, we do need to keep the numbers in mind.

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