Cooper A Multi-dimensional View of Alternatives
Lovins on Baseload Myth
Public discussions of nuclear power, and a surprising number of articles in peer-reviewed journals, are increasingly based on four notions unfounded in fact or logic: that
1. variable renewable sources of electricity (windpower and photovoltaics) can provide little or no reliable electricity because they are not “baseload”—able to run all the time;
2. those renewable sources require such enormous amounts of land, hundreds of times more than nuclear power does, that they’re environmentally unacceptable;
3. all options, including nuclear power, are needed to combat climate change; and
4. nuclear power’s economics matter little because governments must use it anyway to protect the climate.
For specificity, this review of these four notions focuses on the nuclear chapter of Stewart Brand’s 2009 book Whole Earth Discipline, which encapsulates similar views widely expressed and cross-cited by organizations and individuals advocating expansion of nuclear power. It’s therefore timely to subject them to closer scrutiny than they have received in most public media.
This review relies chiefly on five papers, which I gave Brand over the past few years but on which he has been unwilling to engage in substantive discussion. They document6 why expanding nuclear power is uneconomic, is unnecessary, is not undergoing the claimed renaissance in the global marketplace (because it fails the basic test of cost-effectiveness ever more robustly), and, most importantly, will reduce and retard climate protection. That’s because—the empirical cost and installation data show—new nuclear power is so costly and slow that, based on empirical U.S. market data, it will save about 2–20 times less carbon per dollar, and about 20–40 times less carbon per year, than investing instead in the market winners—efficient use of electricity and what The Economist calls “micropower,”...
The “baseload” myth
Brand rejects the most important and successful renewable sources of electricity for one key reason stated on p. 80 and p. 101. On p. 80, he quotes novelist and author Gwyneth Cravens’s definition of “baseload” power as “the minimum amount of proven, consistent, around-the-clock, rain-or-shine power that utilities must supply to meet the demands of their millions of customers.”21 (Thus it describes a pattern of aggregated customer demand.) Two sentences later, he asserts: “So far comes from only three sources: fossil fuels, hydro, and nuclear.” Two paragraphs later, he explains this dramatic leap from a description of demand to a restriction of supply: “Wind and solar, desirable as they are, aren’t part of baseload because they are intermittent—productive only when the wind blows or the sun shines. If some sort of massive energy storage is devised, then they can participate in baseload; without it, they remain supplemental, usually to gas-fired plants.”
That widely heard claim is fallacious. The manifest need for some amount of steady, reliable power is met by generating plants collectively, not individually. That is, reliability is a statistical attribute of all the plants on the grid combined. If steady 24/7 operation or operation at any desired moment were instead a required capability of each individual power plant, then the grid couldn’t meet modern needs, because no kind of power plant is perfectly reliable. For example, in the U.S. during 2003–07, coal capacity was shut down an average of 12.3% of the time (4.2% without warning); nuclear, 10.6% (2.5%); gas-fired, 11.8% (2.8%). Worldwide through 2008, nuclear units were unexpectedly unable to produce 6.4% of their energy output.26 This inherent intermittency of nuclear and fossil-fueled power plants requires many different plants to back each other up through the grid. This has been utility operators’ strategy for reliable supply throughout the industry’s history. Every utility operator knows that power plants provide energy to the grid, which serves load. The simplistic mental model of one plant serving one load is valid only on a very small desert island. The standard remedy for failed plants is other interconnected plants that are working—not “some sort of massive energy storage devised.”
Modern solar and wind power are more technically reliable than coal and nuclear plants; their technical failure rates are typically around 1–2%. However, they are also variable resources because their output depends on local weather, forecastable days in advance with fair accuracy and an hour ahead with impressive precision. But their inherent variability can be managed by proper resource choice, siting, and operation. Weather affects different renewable resources differently; for example, storms are good for small hydro and often for windpower, while flat calm weather is bad for them but good for solar power. Weather is also different in different places: across a few hundred miles, windpower is scarcely correlated, so weather risks can be diversified. A Stanford study found that properly interconnecting at least ten windfarms can enable an average of one-third of their output to provide firm baseload power. Similarly, within each of the three power pools from Texas to the Canadian border, combining uncorrelated windfarm sites can reduce required wind capacity by more than half for the same firm output, thereby yielding fewer needed turbines, far fewer zero-output hours, and easier integration.
A broader assessment of reliability tends not to favor nuclear power. Of all 132 U.S. nuclear plants built—just over half of the 253 originally ordered—21% were permanently and prematurely closed due to reliability or cost problems. Another 27% have completely failed for a year or more at least once. The surviving U.S. nuclear plants have lately averaged ~90% of their full-load full-time potential—a major improvement31 for which the industry deserves much credit—but they are still not fully dependable. Even reliably-running nuclear plants must shut down, on average, for ~39 days every ~17 months for refueling and maintenance. Unexpected failures occur too, shutting down upwards of a billion watts in milliseconds, often for weeks to months. Solar cells and windpower don’t fail so ungracefully.
Power plants can fail for reasons other than mechanical breakdown, and those reasons can affect many plants at once. As France and Japan have learned to their cost, heavily nuclear-dependent regions are particularly at risk because drought, earthquake, a serious safety problem, or a terrorist incident could close many plants simultaneously. And nuclear power plants have a unique further disadvantage: for neutron-physics reasons, they can’t quickly restart after an emergency shutdown, such as occurs automatically in a grid power failure...
From Amory Lovins
Four Nuclear Myths: A Commentary on Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline and on Similar Writings
Journal or Magazine Article, 2009
Available for download:
http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/2009-09_FourNuclearMyths Some nuclear-power advocates claim that wind and solar power can’t provide much if any reliable power because they’re not “baseload,” that they use too much land, that all energy options including new nuclear build are needed to combat climate change, and that nuclear power’s economics don’t matter because climate change will force governments to dictate energy choices and pay for whatever is necessary. None of these claims can withstand analytic scrutiny.
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Amory Lovins, a MacArthur Fellow and consultant physicist, is among the world’s leading innovators in energy and its links with resources, security, development and the environment. He has advised energy and many other industries for more than three decades, as well as the U.S. Departments of Energy and Defense. A former Oxford don, Amory Lovins advises major firms and governments worldwide and has briefed 19 heads of state.
Lovins’ work focuses on transforming hydrocarbon, automobile, real estate, electricity, water, semiconductor, and several other sectors toward advanced resource productivity. Amory Lovins co-founded and is Chairman and Chief Scientist of Rocky Mountain Institute, an independent, market-oriented, entrepreneurial, nonprofit, nonpartisan think-and-do tank, that creates abundance by design. RMI has served or been invited by more than 80 Fortune 500 firms, redesigning more than $30 billion worth of facilities in 29 sectors, with much of its path-finding work involving advanced resource productivity (typically with expanding returns to investment) and innovative business strategies.
Amory has held several visiting academic chairs, most recently as MAP/Ming Professor in Stanford’s School of Engineering, offering the university’s first course on advanced energy efficiency. He has also authored or co-authored hundreds of papers and twenty-nine books including: Small Is Profitable: The Hidden Economic Benefits of Making Electrical Resources the Right Size - an Economist “book of the year” blending financial economics with electrical engineering, and the Pentagon co-sponsored Winning the Oil Endgame, a roadmap for eliminating U.S. oil use by the 2040s, led by business for profit.
His work in over 50 countries has been recognized by the “Alternative Nobel,” Blue Planet, Volvo, Onassis, Nissan, Shingo, Goff Smith, and Mitchell Prizes, the Benjamin Franklin and Happold Medals, ten honorary doctorates, honorary membership of the American Institute of Architects, Foreign Membership of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, honorary Senior Fellowship of the Design Futures Council, and the Heinz, Lindbergh, Jean Meyer, Time Hero for the Planet, Time International Hero of the Environment, Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Leadership, and World Technology Awards.
The Wall Street Journal named Amory Lovins one of thirty-nine people worldwide "most likely to change the course of business.” Newsweek has praised him as "one of the Western world's most influential energy thinkers" and Car magazine ranked him the “twenty-second most powerful person in the global automotive industry.”
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