Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
There’s only here that’s clueless, and that’s you Mr Marlow.
Anybody with half a braincell was warning about this years ago, so where were you then?
There’s also a genuine question to be asked about whether the UK needs more renewable energy at present. Sir Keir claims that a state-backed energy provider will give the UK “real energy independence” but if the shift to clean power is accelerated, as he is suggesting without also building the massive infrastructure that is required, there is a risk that Britain becomes more reliant on fossil fuel imports, not less.
Better perhaps to concentrate on modernising the grid and building the vast electricity storage facilities required to store wind and solar-generated electricity before we double down on renewables. That means more batteries, advanced compressed air energy storage, pumped hydroelectric dams, and underground salt caverns for collecting hydrogen.
Even now Clueless Ben does not grasp the fact the batteries and other forms of storage are far too small to make the slightest difference when the wind stops blowing for weeks on end.
The only possible solution is mass storage of hydrogen. But he does not tell us where all of this hydrogen will actually come from – presumably he thinks you can pluck it out of thin air.
There is only one viable solution, and that is to embark on an emergency expansion of our CCGT fleet, and immediately abandon any further expansion of renewables.
This is our latest prediction of the solar corona for the April 8, 2024 total solar eclipse. The above images show two versions of the predicted white light brightness in the corona at totality; the left is with solar north up, and the right is for Dallas, Texas. Click on the link to see the orientation of the corona for your location. The images have been processed with a radially-graded filter, to approximate what a human eye might see during the eclipse.
This is our latest prediction of the solar corona for the April 8, 2024 total solar eclipse. The above images show two versions of the predicted white light brightness in the corona at totality; the left is with solar north up, and the right is for Dallas, Texas. Click on the link to see the orientation of the corona for your location. The images have been processed with a radially-graded filter, to approximate what a human eye might see during the eclipse.
The Sun is near the maximum phase of the solar cycle, so the solar magnetic field is evolving rapidly. To better capture the dynamic nature of the Sun at this time, we are using a time-dependent MHD model that is updated in near real-time with the latest measurements of the surface magnetic field.T hese animations show how the Sun and our prediction are evolving with time. The animation on the left shows how the prediction at totality has evolved to the present. The animation on the right shows the modeled evolution of the Sun from the start of the prediction.
A few days ago, a 3,300 acre solar power plant in Texas suffered major hail damage. This was a plant so new it was still under construction. The Fighting Jays solar project started generating in 2022, but was not expected to be fully complete until the end of 2024. In theory it was supposed to last for 35 years.
Imagine the outcry if a coal plant was obliterated by hail?
A few days ago, a 3,300 acre solar power plant in Texas suffered major hail damage. This was a plant so new it was still under construction. The Fighting Jays solar project started generating in 2022, but was not expected to be fully complete until the end of 2024. In theory it was supposed to last for 35 years.
It is so large they boasted that it covers 2,499 football fields (like that is a good thing). Despite the vast footprint, it was rated at only 350 MW. At noon at peak production it could generate about half of what one forty year old coal fired turbine makes all day every day, and every night too.
Collecting low density energy is more expensive than the wish-fairies might think.
BREAKING: Hail storm in Damon texas on 3/24/24 destroys 1,000’s of acres of solar farms.
At an average construction price of $1 million per megawatt the project likely cost about $350 million dollars. In order to rebuild it, they will need to remove and dispose of the broken panels, so it may cost even more.
The Fighting Jays solar farm was insured against hail damage. Presumably insurance premiums will be rising.
Weather forecasts have improved in accuracy over the years with today’s 6-day forecasts about as good as the 3-day forecast from 30 years ago. This improvement in overall accuracy has come about for numerous reasons one of which has to do with the much better computing power in today’s world compared to three decades ago.
By Paul Dorian
Surface forecast map for next Monday, April 1st, made by the 00Z “Artificial intelligence” version of the Euro model; Map courtesy ECMWF, tropicaltidbits.com
Overview
It was just a matter of time…artificial intelligence (AI) has hit the numerical weather prediction world with a strong emphasis on “pattern recognition” and there is no telling where this will lead in the world of weather forecasting. Numerical weather prediction is well suited for AI as – in its current form – it requires a tremendous amount of data crunching and super computing power to resolve the physical laws of fluid dynamics to produce weather conditions in the future. One of the most notable AI advances in recent years has come with the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts which is generating experimental AI forecasts that are made available to the public.
Surface forecast map for next Monday, April 1st, made by the 00Z “conventional” version of the Euro model; Map courtesy ECMWF, tropicaltidbits.com
Details
Weather forecasts have improved in accuracy over the years with today’s 6-day forecasts about as good as the 3-day forecast from 30 years ago. This improvement in overall accuracy has come about for numerous reasons one of which has to do with the much better computing power in today’s world compared to three decades ago. Artificial intelligence is now spurring a new revolution in numerical weather prediction that many believe will produce model-based weather forecasts as good or even better than the best traditional models.
The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) is known for generating what is considered to be one of the top “traditional” computer forecast models in the world known to most as the “Euro”. In the fall of 2023, this agency began to generate its own experimental AI model-based forecasts known officially as the “ECMWF-AIFS” where AIFS is an acronym for “Artificial Intelligence Forecasting System”. This experimental forecast model, based on ECMWF initial conditions, has been made available in an alpha version to the general public for free and can be found at their own web site here. The resolution of the ECMWF-AIFS model is approximately one degree (111 km) with plans for this to be regularly increased in the future.
850 mb temperature anomaly forecast map for next Monday, April 1st, made by the 00Z “Artificial intelligence” version of the Euro model; Map courtesy ECMWF, tropicaltidbits.com
Traditional weather models start off by feeding a snapshot of current conditions, based on observations from satellites, weather stations and buoys, into a grid-like computer model that divides the atmosphere into millions of boxes. This snapshot is then run forward in time for each box by applying equations that are based on the physical laws of fluid dynamics and this requires great computational power. Indeed, this kind of data crunching requires supercomputers with 1 million processors and can take several hours to run…usually four times a day.
850 mb temperature anomaly forecast map for next Monday, April 1st, made by the 00Z “Artificial intelligence” version of the Euro model; Map courtesy ECMWF, tropicaltidbits.com
The new AI models play a role in weather prediction by simulating and analyzing past weather events, learning from historical data, and recognizing recurring weather patterns which enhances AI’s ability to predict future weather conditions. In other words, AI skips the expense of solving the equations in favor of “deep learning” after training on 40 years of ECMWF “reanalysis” data (a combination of observations and short-term model forecasts that best represents past weather) (source).
The European Agency is not alone in producing AI forecast models as numerous tech giants are getting involved. In a paper published recently in Science, Google introduced GraphCast and claims it can make weather predictions more accurately (and faster) than the ECMWF High-Resolution Forecast (HRES) on 90% of its verification targets up to 10 days in advance.
The advance in AI forecasting has been rapid during the past few years and one of the important next steps will be to produce ensemble results, which helps to capture uncertainty by running a model multiple times with slightly differing input parameters to create a range of outcomes. While few expect traditional model forecasts to disappear anytime soon, AI will likely approach the point in the near-term where it can be a very useful complement. And when it comes to artificial intelligence, the bottom line is that there is really no telling where this will lead us over the next five or ten years; therefore, as is usually the case when it comes to weather forecasting, stay tuned.
Dominion Energy has issued a brief response to the whale protection lawsuit filed by CFACT et al. When I first saw it, I thought there must be some mistake, but it has appeared in a lot of press reports.
Dominion Energy has issued a brief response to the whale protection lawsuit filed by CFACT et al. When I first saw it, I thought there must be some mistake, but it has appeared in a lot of press reports.
This central claim by Dominion is simply absurd: “The overwhelming consensus of federal agencies and scientific organizations is that offshore wind does not adversely impact marine life.” No adverse impact? Seriously?
In reality, the responsible federal agency predicts an enormous adverse impact.
NOAA‘s National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) has authorized Dominion to acoustically harass almost 80,000 marine mammals and these noise harassments are certainly adverse impacts. They even include temporary deafness, which can easily be deadly.
First, some legal Definitions from the Marine Mammal Protection Act that NMFS is supposed to enforce:
“Level A harassment means any act of pursuit, torment, or annoyance that has the potential to injure a marine mammal or marine mammal stock in the wild.”
“Level B harassment refers to acts that have the potential to disturb (but not injure) a marine mammal or marine mammal stock in the wild by disrupting behavioral patterns, including, but not limited to, migration, breathing, nursing, breeding, feeding, or sheltering.”
Note that while level B harassment is not itself injurious, it may lead to injury or death. For example, if the animal flees the noise harassment into heavy ship traffic and is struck and killed.
Analog: a firecracker thrown at a dog causes it to run into a busy street, where it is struck and killed. The car killed the dog, but the firecracker caused the death.
A year and a half ago, I wrote an article about this risk: “How to kill whales with offshore wind.”
Most of the Dominion noise harassment is from pile driving (plus some sonar). Here is a good example of the Feds describing how pile driving noise harassment can cause harm. I could not have said it better.
“It is possible that pile driving could displace animals into areas with lower habitat quality or higher risk of vessel collision or fisheries interaction. Multiple construction activities within the same calendar year could potentially affect migration, foraging, calving, and individual fitness. The magnitude of impacts would depend upon the locations, duration, and timing of concurrent construction. Such impacts could be long term, of high intensity, and of high exposure level. Generally, the more frequently an individual’s normal behaviors are disrupted or the longer the duration of the disruption, the greater the potential for biologically significant consequences to individual fitness. The potential for biologically significant effects is expected to increase with the number of pile-driving events to which an individual is exposed.”
I cannot imagine why Dominion would put out such an absurd claim. Is it ignorance, deception, or something else? In any case, I would love to see them try to use this nutty argument in Court.
Bring back the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB), all is forgiven. No really. This is a lament born not out of nostalgia for some imagined, flawless past that never really existed, but of genuine concern for the increasingly dysfunctional, opaque and ever less secure nature of today’s UK energy markets.
Surge pricing stands to deepen the divide between the country’s haves and have nots.
Bring back the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB), all is forgiven. No really. This is a lament born not out of nostalgia for some imagined, flawless past that never really existed, but of genuine concern for the increasingly dysfunctional, opaque and ever less secure nature of today’s UK energy markets.
And they could be about to get even more complicated and impenetrable, with proposals by the energy regulator Ofgem to further frogmarch the nation into “smart meter” oblivion by abolishing the current price cap regime in favour of “surge pricing”, where the price varies according to overall demand.
Theoretically, you would then be able to reduce your energy bills by confining your usage to off-peak times, or – reductio ad absurdum – cease paying altogether by not using any electricity at all.
Whatever its faults – which were admittedly legion – you at least knew where you stood with the CEGB. As a state-owned electricity behemoth, the CEGB had just one function; to ensure that the lights stayed on or, in other words, that growing demand for electricity was always satisfied.
For the consumer, there was none of today’s faffing around with price comparison websites, none of the worry about what deal you were on and whether there might be a better one hiding behind all the others; instead, there was one price, ultimately determined, like a tax, by government ministers with at least half an eye on the ballot box.
Even so, the system sort of worked. Outages were rare, unless caused by striking miners, and although there were some ruinously expensive wrong turns – such as the decision to bet the nation’s nuclear future on British-designed Advanced Gas-Cooled Reactors – the CEGB broadly met its purpose. Run by engineers, and not accountants, this was to provide the economy with electricity, pure and simple.
Sadly, the same cannot be said about the horlicks that are today’s energy markets.
The intention behind the breakup of the CEGB and the subsequent privatisation of its various moving parts was – besides raising money for the Exchequer – to put the consumer firmly in the driving seat.
Yet it was not to be. The industry never fully escaped political interference and is today so complicated and highly regulated that it would challenge the intellect even of Sir Walter Marshall, the noted nuclear physicist who with a tyrannical grip for years ran the CEGB, to properly understand it.
It’s fair to say that, when it comes to domestic and business energy supply, privatisation hasn’t worked as hoped, in sharp contrast to telecommunications, where it has hugely improved quality, choice and price.
Always guaranteed to make a bad situation even worse, into this quagmire steps the industry regulator, Ofgem, with proposals for “surge pricing”, a concept that rests substantially on the ability of suppliers to strongarm the rest of the nation into the snake oil world of “smart meters”.
The notorious Price-Anderson Act, enacted in 1957 as part of a federal effort to get peaceful atoms into commercial use, has been extended seven times and is set to expire on its own terms next year (end of 2025). Last week’s post by Kennedy Maize described the latest federal subsidies to keep nuclear afloat as a forward-looking industry.
“Let’s be clear. Nuclear power’s Secondary Financial Protection is not insurance. Insurance is a voluntary agreement among the parties in which all or a portion of a risk is transferred from one party to another in return for a payment, which is set by the participants, ideally in a competitive market. The SFP is a government mandated protection racket.” (Devanny, below)
“The only solution is a fixed compensation scheme with each plant being responsible for its own liability insurance. If a compensation scheme, based only on the dose profile each individual and business would have incurred assuming no evacuation, is combined with a radiation-harm model that recognizes our bodies’ ability to repair radiation damage within limits, the risk will be easily insurable.” (Devanny, below)
The notorious Price-Anderson Act, enacted in 1957 as part of a federal effort to get peaceful atoms into commercial use, has been extended seven times and is set to expire on its own terms next year (end of 2025). Last week’s post by Kennedy Maize described the latest federal subsidies to keep nuclear afloat as a forward-looking industry.
At LinkedIn, Jack Devanny explored the in’s-and-out’s of Price-Anderson to ask: Is this subsidy really worth it to the regulated industry? How should nuclear liability be restructured in a more rational way? His analysis follows.
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Not Deaths, Dollars are at Stake
In the US, the response to the next sizable nuclear power plant release will be governed by the Price Anderson Act and the American tort system. Under Price Anderson, any US nuclear power plant over 100 MWe must purchase liability insurance equal to “the maximum amount available at reasonable cost and on reasonable terms from private sources.” That amount is determined by the NRC, which just increased it to $500 million. This is called Primary Financial Protection.
There is a single provider of this insurance, American Nuclear Insurers (ANI), which lays off the risk to a consortium of underwriters at Lloyds and elsewhere. The annual per plant premium is roughly $1,000,000. Since there are about 70 such plants, a little more than 7 years of revenues covers the entire underwriters’ risk. It’s an extremely profitable arrangement. Over the last 50 plus years, The ANI consortium has paid out $150 million in claims, $71 million at TMI, while collecting over 4 billion dollars in premiums, and further profiting from the investment returns on that money.
In a normal market, sellers would be scrambling to do more of this business, pushing the price down. The non-life insurance market is very large, collecting over 2 trillion USD in premia in 2013. And in fact, underwriters estimate that ten to 15 billion dollars worth of coverage is available at a cost of 0.1 to 0.2 cents/kWh.\cite{wna-liab} So why does the NRC claim that only 500 million dollars is available at “reasonable cost”?1
One reason is that under Price Anderson the Primary Financial Protection is backed up by a Secondary Financial Protection (SFP). This is a post-casualty assessment on all US nuclear plants, each of which is liable up to $138 million per reactor per casualty, collectable in annual installments of $20 million. These numbers are periodically adjusted for inflation. Currently, the value of this pool is about $14 billion.
Let’s be clear. SFP is not insurance. Insurance is a voluntary agreement among the parties in which all or a portion of a risk is transferred from one party to another in return for a payment, which is set by the participants, ideally in a competitive market. The SFP is a government mandated protection racket. Youse want to stay in business, sign here or we burn the place down. Of course, the NRC need not resort to arson. It will simply yank your license. The people who will end up paying will be the utilities’ customers. There’s nothing voluntary about it.
When the next big US release occurs, $500 million won’t begin to cover the claims. The $14 billion won’t begin to cover the claims. The American tort system will see to that. After the Deepwater Horizon blow out, the ambulance chasers descended on the Florida Keys, where I was living. They held “seminars” at the fanciest hotels with plenty of free food and drink. These seminars instructed everybody store owners, bar owners, charter boat captains, fishing guides, how to make claims ….
Charter boat skippers were getting $100,000 checks for lost business. One Key West bar got $600,000. The oil spill never came within 700 miles of the Keys. If there was any lost business in the Keys (doubtful), it was due to grossly inflated and just plain inaccurate coverage of the spill. BP’s total bill ended up around $65 billion dollars. If the ambulance chasers can do this with an oil spill, can you imagine what they would do with radiation?
At Three Mile Island in 1979, the maximum individual dose to the public was 0.37 mSv, about the same as the additional dose he would have received by moving to Denver for a month. The paid claims totaled $71 million, but barely over 50% of the money went to the public, Figure 1.
The Fukushima release was very roughly 100,000 times larger. It has produced no detectable radiation harm among the public, nor is any expected.\cite{unscear-2021} There was no need for any evacuation, certainly not evacuations lasting more than the time that it took to stop the releases. Yet the compensation bill is now over $73 billion, Table 1, in a country that has a far more disciplined tort system than the US.2
In both releases, there would have been no detectable radiation harm to the public without any evacuations. In both releases, essentially all the harm was caused by unnecessary evacuations, mandatory in the case of Fukushima, combined with nonsensical restrictions on return. At Fukushima, the mandatory evacuation area maxed out at 874 km2. After Fukushima, NRC Commission Chairman Jaczko said he would have evacuated everybody out to 50 miles (80 km), an area of more than 10,000 km2. The NRC would have increased the Fukushima trauma by more than an order of magnitude.
In a Fukushima-like release, American tort lawyers will blow through 14 billion dollars like a kid going through his weekly allowance. Price Anderson has some provisions that attempt to control the ambulance chasers. All claims go straight to the federal District Court for the district in which the casualty occurred. No jurisdiction shopping. All claims are channeled to the plant owner. The liability is no fault; and no punitive claims are allowed.
But the applicable law is the tort law of the state in which the release happened. And the jury will be made up of pissed off, scared, sympathetic neighbors (aka peers), most of whom will have a comic book view of radiation harm. If St. Lucie halfway up the Florida peninsula is the offending plant, the Keys bar owners and fishing captains will have a far stronger argument than they did after Deepwater Horizon, even if the plume comes nowhere near the Keys, as it almost certainly will not. In a Fukushima sized release in the US, we could easily see a trillion dollars in claims. No wonder a release is intolerable. It’s not the deaths; it’s the dollars.
Enter INPO
The Price Anderson Act responds to this factor of 200 difference between what’s said to be insurable and the potential claims by setting up an income transfer from all American nuclear power plant shareholders and ratepayers to the ambulance chasers and their plaintiffs. Price Anderson shackles all American nuclear plants together. Price Anderson is a mandatory suicide pact.
How does a plant protect itself from a sub-standard plant? The answer is INPO, the Institute of Nuclear Plant Operations. INPO was set up in 1979 after Three Mile Island revealed the danger. INPO is a self-regulation inspection service, a bit like the Classification Societies and the TUV’s. Without INPO approval, you almost certainly cannot get insurance. But there are three fundamental differences.
1) INPO is motivated not by the cost of actual harm, but by the cost of exceedingly unrealistic perceptions of radiation harm combined with the American tort system.
2) INPO is a creature of the plant owners, not the insurers. As a practical matter, INPO is controlled by the big nuclear utilities.
3) INPO is a monopoly. It does not have to compete with other INPO’s for customers.
(1) and (3) means there is no balancing mechanism between economy and preventing a release. Tasked with the job of preventing a trillion dollar claim, INPO has a monomaniacal focus on “safety culture”, which it defines as “an organization’s values and behaviors that serve to make nuclear safety the overriding priority.“[emphasis mine] INPO is based on the twin premises that a release is intolerable (on dollar grounds) and a proper safety culture can prevent that release. INPO is the latest embodiment of the Two Lies.
Regulatory compliance is not good enough. INPO often calls this “striving for excellence.” INPO inspects each plant about every two years. A team of 20 or more descends on the plant for about two weeks. Based on the report, INPO assigns a 1 to 5 score to the plant. Careers depend on that number. INPO sets up a rating competition among the plants. The cost of the electricity (and implicitly the harm from alternate sources) is given no weight in this rating. With INPO around, the NRC inspection process is superfluous.3
How does a plant demonstrate that safety is its overriding priority? By developing detailed procedures and extensively documenting those procedures and the plant’s adherence to those procedures. Over time, the competition to have the most detailed, best documented procedures results in an immense and ever growing paperwork burden.
The initial impact of INPO was decidedly positive. Unlike the inept NRC, it had real motivation and smart, experienced inspectors, who knew where the problems lie and what to look for. By sharing information on problems and best practices, it raised standards and avoided nonsensical situations such as led to TMI. 18 months prior to TMI, the Davis-Besse plant experienced essentially the same failure as at Three Mile Island. However, the Shift Supervisor Mike Derivan went against his training, figured out what was happening, and prevented any damage to the reactor. This information was never distributed to the rest of the industry. So the TMI operators did not realize all they had to do was isolate an open safety valve, and TMI would have been a non-event.
But bureaucratic monopolies grow like cancer. INPO now employs some 350 people, and has an annual budget well over $100 million dollars. A plant’s INPO dues are as large as its liability insurance premium. INPO procedures and paperwork require hundreds of people per plant.4 But nobody complains. That would reveal a poor safety culture. It might effect their rating. INPO is ALARA without the R. One result is that fully depreciated nuclear plants, which should have a marginal cost of less than 1 cents per kWh, cannot compete with gas plants that have a fuel cost of 3 cents per kWh.
(2) sets up a barrier to entry. In the long run, we must have competition among the suppliers of nuclear electricity to force the cost of that electricity down. If I’m an upstart who thinks I can sell nuclear power cheaper than an Excelon or Entergy, I can’t just set up shop and offer my power to local coops, undercutting the big guys. I must get insurance. As a practical matter, that means I must get approval from INPO. But INPO is controlled by my competitors. I do not know how the INPO inspectors are going to treat me, especially since I’m the new guy on the block and I’m not really set up to do all the paperwork. Maybe I should go elsewhere.
INPO guarantees that American nuclear power will be far too expensive to contribute in a meaningful way to the country’s wealth and health or to reducing green house gas emissions. But INPO is a logical, if not inevitable, response to the combination of the Price Anderson suicide pact and the American tort system.
The Only Way Out
The only solution is a fixed compensation scheme with each plant being responsible for its own liability insurance. If a compensation scheme, based only on the dose profile each individual and business would have incurred assuming no evacuation, is combined with a radiation-harm model that recognizes our bodies’ ability to repair radiation damage within limits, the risk will be easily insurable.
As an exercise, the the Sigmoid No Threshold (SNT radiation harm model was applied to the Chernobyl release, excluding the childhood thyroid cancers, which could have been avoided by control of contaminated food. See Why Nuclear Power has been a Flop, Table 6.15. At $350 per lost life day, the public (non-liquidator) compensation came to about $130 million dollars.\cite{flop3}[Table 6.15] From a strictly radiation point of view, this is almost certainly over-compensation. 30 years after the release, the Harvard Medical School found no statistical difference between the cancer incidence in the Ukraine districts adjacent to Chernobyl and those far away.\cite{leung-2019}
These calculations show that an SNT-like compensation scheme, combined with reasonable buffer zones and control of contaminated food, would be feasible. A cap of 500 million dollars would almost never be exceeded. The insurance market is already happily and very profitably writing nuclear liability coverage for 500 million. According to the underwriters, there’s plenty of appetite for more. Each plant can and should be responsible for its own insurance. That way if the underwriting market is unhappy with the way a plant is performing, the insurance will be yanked, and the plant shut down. The good plants will be unaffected. Once such a scheme is implemented, the federal government can leave it up to the underwriters and the locals to regulate nuclear power.
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1 In a way, the NRC is right. In a competitive market, insurers pay out in claims about what they collect in premia. They make most of their profit on the investment returns from the period during which they control that money. If nuclear plants could go directly to the insurance markets, the premia would be a lot more reasonable. 0.1 cents/kWh for the marginal insurance is a gargantuan ripoff.
2 It’s ironic that the real victims of the tsunami, many of whom lost members of the family and their homes, were left to fend for themselves; while the artificial victims were paid $1000 per person per month to stay away from their undamaged homes. Most of the area around Fukushima Daiichi is reasonably well protected from tsunamis, since the shoreline bluff is about 30 meters high. At Fukushima Daiichi, they excavated this bluff down to 10 meters. This was done to make it easier to get large, vessel delivered components up to the plant, and cut the cost of pumping seawater through the condensers.
3 INPO’s individual plant evaluations are confidential; but, if INPO is aware of any violation of a NRC regulation, and the plant does not report it to the NRC as required, INPO will.
4 This cost like the NRC insurance requirement is pretty much size independent. SMR promoters rarely point this out. INPO has been awarded tax free status on the grounds that it is a charitable organization that relieves “the burden of government”.
Next time someone tells you that wind, solar and batteries are
the magical solution for all our energy needs ask them
if they have an idea of the cost… to the environment.
Mark Mills explains the many ways the deck is stacked against those gambling on Wind and Solar energy to replace hydrocarbon fuels. The transcript is below in italics with my bolds and added images.
Have you ever heard of “unobtanium”?
It’s the magical energy mineral found on the planet Pandora in the movie, Avatar. It’s a fantasy in a science fiction script. But environmentalists think they’ve found it here on earth in the form of wind and solar power.
They think all the energy we need can be supplied by building enough wind and solar farms; and enough batteries.
The simple truth is that we can’t. Nor should we want to—not if our goal is to be good stewards of the planet.
To understand why, consider some simple physics realities that aren’t being talked about.
All sources of energy have limits that can’t be exceeded. The maximum rate at which the sun’s photons can be converted to electrons is about 33%. Our best solar technology is at 26% efficiency. For wind, the maximum capture is 60%. Our best machines are at 45%.
So, we’re pretty close to wind and solar limits. Despite PR claims about big gains coming, there just aren’t any possible. And wind and solar only work when the wind blows and the sun shines. But we need energy all the time. The solution we’re told is to use batteries.
Again, physics and chemistry make this very hard to do.
Consider the world’s biggest battery factory, the one Tesla built in Nevada. It would take 500 years for that factory to make enough batteries to store just one day’s worth of America’s electricity needs. This helps explain why wind and solar currently still supply less than 3% of the world’s energy, after 20 years and billions of dollars in subsidies.
Putting aside the economics, if your motive is to protect the environment, you might want to rethink wind, solar, and batteries because, like all machines, they’re built from nonrenewable materials.
Consider some sobering numbers:
A single electric-car battery weighs about half a ton. Fabricating one requires digging up, moving, and processing more than 250 tons of earth somewhere on the planet.
Building a single 100 Megawatt wind farm, which can power 75,000 homes requires some 30,000 tons of iron ore and 50,000 tons of concrete, as well as 900 tons of non-recyclable plastics for the huge blades. To get the same power from solar, the amount of cement, steel, and glass needed is 150% greater.
Then there are the other minerals needed, including elements known as rare earth metals. With current plans, the world will need an incredible 200 to 2,000 percent increase in mining for elements such as cobalt, lithium, and dysprosium, to name just a few.
Where’s all this stuff going to come from? Massive new mining operations. Almost none of it in America, some imported from places hostile to America, and some in places we all want to protect.
Australia’s Institute for a Sustainable Future cautions that a global “gold” rush for energy materials will take miners into “…remote wilderness areas [that] have maintained high biodiversity because they haven’t yet been disturbed.”
And who is doing the mining? Let’s just say that they’re not all going to be union workers with union protections.
Amnesty International paints a disturbing picture: “The… marketing of state-of-the-art technologies are a stark contrast to the children carrying bags of rocks.”
And then the mining itself requires massive amounts of conventional energy, as do the energy-intensive industrial processes needed to refine the materials and then build the wind, solar, and battery hardware.
Then there’s the waste. Wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries have a relatively short life; about twenty years. Conventional energy machines, like gas turbines, last twice as long.
With current plans, the International Renewable Energy Agency calculates that by 2050, the disposal of worn-out solar panels will constitute over double the tonnage of all of today’s global plastic waste.Worn-out wind turbines and batteries will add millions of tons more waste. It will be a whole new environmental challenge.
Before we launch history’s biggest increase in mining, dig up millions of acres in pristine areas, encourage childhood labor, and create epic waste problems, we might want to reconsider our almost inexhaustible supply of hydrocarbons—the fuels that make our marvelous modern world possible.
And technology is making it easier to acquire and cleaner to use them every day.
It would take a wind farm the size of Albany county NY to replace the now closed Indian Point nuclear power plant.
The following comparisons are typical—and instructive:
It costs about the same to drill one oil well as it does to build one giant wind turbine. And while that turbine generates the energy equivalent of about one barrel of oil per hour, the oil rig produces 10 barrels per hour. It costs less than 50 cents to store a barrel of oil or its equivalent in natural gas. But you need $200 worth of batteries to hold the energy contained in one oil barrel.
Next time someone tells you that wind, solar and batteries are the magical solution for all our energy needs ask them if they have an idea of the cost… to the environment.
“Unobtanium” works fine in the movies. But we don’t live in movies. We live in the real world.
I’m Mark Mills, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, for Prager University.
Millions of households with smart meters face paying more for their electricity at the busiest times of day under regulator plans.
Ofgem is consulting on introducing a “dynamic” energy price cap to meet the demand of net zero, despite repeated assurances from the Government that smart meter technology would not result in more expensive energy bills for consumers.
The energy watchdog said it would look to “encourage consumer flexibility” by basing the energy price cap around the wholesale costs of electricity throughout the day.
The plans include allowing suppliers to charge more for electricity when the grid is at its busiest, as Britons move away from conventional gas boilers and adopt electric-powered heat pumps and electric vehicles.
Proposals would scrap the energy price cap – currently £1,690 a year – and effectively switch the entire country to a 1970s-style “time-of-use” tariff that charges different prices throughout the day.
This would either be introduced in weekly “time bands” that are divided into more expensive peak and cheaper off-peak periods, or linked directly to half-hourly wholesale market prices.
Ofgem admitted the latter proposal would risk “exposing customers to wholesale price variability” and that “many consumers may struggle to engage with constantly evolving pricing”.
The Energy Price Cap should never have been introduced. But now energy users with a smart meter may be faced with a fait accompli, finding it difficult to find any supplier prepared to offer a fixed price.
And one thing is absolutely certain – consumers will not be better off under any new system.
And as may experts are pointing out, many people need access to electricity all day. It is all very well for a household which is empty during the day, but what will happen to old people or mums with kids who need to heat their homes all day.
Indeed how many of these groups will even have access to the information needed to optimise pricing?
Worse still, this is not only about Time of Day pricing – wholesale prices can often peak at much higher levels for days on end when wind power is low in winter. There will be no escape from this peak pricing at times like this – everybody will end up paying.
If the government is intent on bringing in this policy, it must legislate for an opt out for anybody who wants to remain with a fixed price, and that should be set at an affordable level.
As the Anthropogenic Climate Crisis intensifies, the U.S. Federal government has rushed to the aid of our planet. In a truly beneficent act, the government is providing $170,900,000 (in words it sounds even more impressive: one hundred and seventy million, nine hundred thousand dollars) to Save The Planet through Green Macaroni.
As the Anthropogenic Climate Crisis intensifies, the U.S. Federal government has rushed to the aid of our planet. In a truly beneficent act, the government is providing $170,900,000 (in words it sounds even more impressive: one hundred and seventy million, nine hundred thousand dollars) to Save The Planet through Green Macaroni.
You may not have known that the production of macaroni (with or without cheese) has been endangering all life on Earth – a literal existential threat — but it is apparently true — $170 million worth of true.
“Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said Monday that her agency would partially fund 33 different projects in 20 states to test methods for curbing emissions from a wide variety of factories and industrial plants, calling it ‘the single largest industrial decarbonization investment in American history.’….”Kraft Heinz, a food manufacturer, would get up to $170.9 million to install electric boilers and heat pumps at 10 facilities across the country, where they would be used to generate the large amounts of heat needed for things like drying macaroni without directly burning fossil fuels.”
Haven’t we always told you that the government is here to help you, the common man, have a better and happier life?
Soon you will be able to help Save the Planet® by eating Green Macaroni.
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