Merkel triumphs in German election, will drop socialist coalition - implications for nuclear phase-out

Physicist and German Chancellor Angela Merkel has widened her lead in today's election, say exit polls:

[BBC] Merkel 'heads for' new coalition

This means she can dissolve her coalition with the anti-nuclear Social Democratic Party (SPD), in favor of the Free Democratic Party (FDP). The expected result is to delay the nuclear phase-out in Germany by over a decade; from an earlier article -

Merkel today reiterated her plan to seek a coalition with the Free Democrats after the Sept. 27 election. The alliance with the junior partners who also back an extended phase-out would end her three-year alliance with the Social Democrats, the architects of legislation passed in 2002 to close the plants.

[Bloomberg] Merkel Favors Extending Nuclear Phase-Out by Up to 15 Years

Notably, a majority of the German public opposes nuclear power, supporting some form of phase-out:

About 32 percent of Germans favor speeding up the phase-out while 31 percent want the government to stick to its timetable for closure, a July 12 survey published by polling company Forsa showed. Another 16 percent backed prolonging the plants’ life- cycle for an unspecified period, while 17 percent said Germany should avoid a phase-out altogether.

Other blog reactions:

[Atomic Insights] Hooray - Initial Election Results from Germany Indicate Nuclear Phase Out Plan May Be Reconsidered

[Next Big Future] Todays Election in Germany Will Determine the Fate of 17 Nuclear reactors

Newsbox

One of our bloggers has gone into politics. David MacKay, Cambridge physicist and author of the absolutely unique Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air (and accompanying blog) is now (the?) chief climate advisor to the UK.

Professor Barry Brook announces a new advocacy group for what can best be described as a "technological utopia". Or as he nobly puts it: "We can now usher in a post-scarcity era while solving the most intractable problems that threaten life on Earth." The fast-reactor fuel cycle is high on their priorities, as you would guess by skimming their membership list. Oh, and James Hansen is involved too - news coverage to follow?

Charles Barton has been pointing out real-world examples of wind intermittency failures [1] [2]. One source is the real-time wind generation data from the US Northwest, available here.

In the UAE, a $41 billion nuclear power bid is about to be awarded to one of three consortia.

The world's first major carbon tax is being sponsored by Sarkozy - but France is not following. (Those poll numbers - ouch!) Very notably, the proposed implementation is a revenue-neutral tax with full rebate, says PM Fillion.

And in Finland, the first EPR is moving to completion: an impressive PR video captures the installation of the containment building dome.

Olkiluoto EPR (Credit AREVA)

The psychotic wing of the ecological movement

Currently on Boing-Boing:

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/09/23/lamp-that-runs-on-hu.html

In order to power this "lamp", you must cut yourself and fill it with your own blood, which produces light by some (undescribed) chemiluminescent reaction. The point is that you suffer for your energy usage, or feel shame for your gluttonous consumption. In the usual euphemism, it "raises awareness".

A similar concept I saw on the 'eco'blogs, whose name I cannot remember (anyone?), is an "energy efficiency" bracelet, which delivers a painful shock when your electricity consumption exceeds some ecofascist-mandated maximum. Basically, shock behaviour modification.

This is why I am wary of the phrase "efficiency" - it means extremely different things in different contexts. In some, it means cost-saving measures through smart engineering. In others, it means consumption modification (e.g. California's banning of large-screen TVs, which co-opts the phrase "efficiency"). But in the depths of eco-hell, "efficiency" is a direct assault against human livelihood - radical, cultish ludditism which seeks to outlaw civilization and impose its absolutist religion of shame and self-mortifcation. When nutcases from Greenpeace show you their "visonary" graphs of the future, with global energy consumption dramatically falling (marked with the label "efficiency"), they don't mean hybrid cars: they mean destroying civilization as we know it, plunging earth into a new dark age. They mean enforced poverty, at a level western civilization can barely comprehend. They see rural Chinese farmers' abject destitution, and therein they see their role model, which they call "efficiency". It's their Shibboleth.

So I usually add qualifiers to my use of "efficiency".

A few numbers on small natural gas generators

[Der Spiegel] A Power Station in Your Basement

I'll make this short. I won't discuss obvious issues of CO2 emissions, fuel prices, or fuel security (e.g. Gazprom).

The claim is that Lichtblick will put a 20 kWe natural gas generator in your home basement, which will function as a distributed cogeneration power plant.

At the center of their marketing is this particularly interesting number:

Thanks to the engine's highly intelligent design -- and the fact that the heat it produces can be directly used to heat the house -- the efficiency factor of the Volkswagen mini thermal powerplant lies at around 94 percent.

To understand how that is an improvement over the current situation, you first have to know that the efficiency factor of your average nuclear power plant is only between 30 percent and 40 percent and that even modern coal- and gas-fired powerplants only reach an efficiency factor of between 40 percent and 60 percent.

But as is easily demonstrated, this is impossible. The heat output of a 20 kWe natural gas generator is orders of magnitude greater than what typical residential houses use in winter. There is no way for the victims customers to use but a tiny fraction of the heat - therefore it must be discarded. So even if you accept the accounting "methodology" they use, it is not achievable anyway.

And in fact, this is not an efficient system at all. They say efficiency is its selling point. But in fact, it is far less efficient than a utility power plant. Let's run numbers.

To start, the predators sellers doesn't actually reveal the true thermodynamic efficiency of their system. But this is no setback - as it happens, 20kW-scale gas generators are a standard commodity. So let's look at a commerical model which actually provides a datasheet:

Generac Series 20 kW

Datasheets are at the bottom. Here's the relevant figures:

• 18 kWe peak output (on natural gas; 20 kWe on LPG)
• 294 ft^3/hour NG consumption (at full load)

And using this handy conversion table from BP, we see that this turbine consumes about 319 Megajoules (calorific - heat content) of gas per hour - that is, yields 89 kW of heat.

So then, here's our typical 20 kWe gas generator: 18 kWe / 89 kWt = 20% thermodynamic efficiency.

And that's what counts. This is of course terrible by power plant standards - which as the Spiegel quote says, are typically 40-60% efficient for fossil fuels. Or: they use 1/3-1/2 the fuel, per kWh electricity, of the small home generators. And so, 1/3-1/2 the CO2 emissions.

(They also boast a comparison with (LWR) nuclear efficiencies, which is of course utterly meaningless as they emit zero CO2 or pollutants at any efficiency. Since when is efficiency in and of itself important - taken in isolation from other factors? Is a 35% efficient nuclear reactor, at half the cost and 100% less pollutants than a 60% efficient CCGT natural gas power plant, in any meaningful way inferior? But I digress.)

Of course, I've distracted from the central argument: that these are cogenerating power plants - the waste heat is not discarded but rather, supposedly, used for central heating or water heating.

This is completely wrong. Even if you accept this way of accounting efficiency, it is not achievable in residential homes (the advertised market), because they cannot possibly consume 100 kW of waste heat. In the real world:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/neic/brochure/oil_gas/rngp/index.html

EIA figures say the average US natural-gas heated Midwest home uses 85 million ft^3 gas over the winter. This is 5.9 kW average (in winter), or 2.9 kW amortized over the year.

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c7/page_53.shtml

Another source for comparison: Prof. David MacKay's book estimates the typical British household to require 37 kWh/day for all heating purposes (1.5 kW average, over the year) - a lower figure (climate difference?). He cites his personal natural gas consumption as 40 kWh/day (1.7 kW).

So wherever the range, 1.5 kW or 3 kW, this is almost two orders of magnitude short of the 100 kW thermal output of a 20 kWe gas generator. A typical house would use less than 3% of the waste heat, discarding the rest. So we can generously estimate an "efficiency factor" of 23%, including heat.

Why is it so bad? Several reasons. First, the generators are much larger than the scale of residential consumption - they are "distributed power plants". So houses can not make use of the waste heat stream (although perhaps apartments buildings or businesses could.) Could they be smaller? Perhaps, but your efficiency would be even worse. That's the second factor: efficiency scales with size, so tiny generators are on the wrong end of the size scale.

GE gas turbine

For comparison, take a real gas turbine. 350 MW sized, multiple thermodynamic cycles (gas turbine + steam turbine for recovering low-temperature heat). Up at 57% efficiency - almost triple that of the small generators.

http://www.gepower.com/prod_serv/products/gas_turbines_cc/en/f_class/ms9001fa.htm

One more calculation for fun. Natural gas is an extremely expensive fuel. Piping it to small houses makes it even more expensive. Burning that utility-piped gas at very low efficiency... do you even want to know?

German utility gas pries (graph) averaged about €0.65/m^3 in 2007. So at 20% efficiency, this is 45c/kWh(e) - for the fuel costs alone!

But nevertheless, the Spiegel article credulously reports the claims that this system is (i) cheaper and (ii) more efficient than utility power plants. That's journalism for you.

Top 10 fantastically ridiculous Green ideas for energy

This article isn't about solar panels. Oh, no... you're in for a real treat.

Presented for your amusement.

(To the best of the author's knowledge, none of these articles are intentional parodies. (Actually, they're highly-ranked Green blogs...))

10. Crematorium power -- "while some may protest Halmstad’s plan on moral grounds, I’m sure that the potential monetary savings for the town will ultimately keep them quiet"

9. Solar-paneled roads -- "paving the country's interstate highway system with glass panels... would accomplish that goal"

8. Kite power -- "will soar up to 30,000 feet..."

7. Bioelectricity in trees -- "the next renewable energy revolution..."

6. Revolving-door generator -- "If you think about the thousands of doors across the country spinning around all day, everyday..."

5. Gravity powered lamp -- "part of his master’s thesis at the College of Architecture..."

4. Kinetic road plates -- "What appears on the surface to be a gimmicky way to produce energy is, in actuality..."

3. Kinetic raindrop power -- "a clean, 21st century energy system means trying to get energy out of pretty much anything"

2. Piezoelectric dancefloor -- "DANCE TO SAVE THE WORLD"

1. Toilet-flush hydroelectric turbine -- "Pooptricity"

Switzerland runs 95% clean electricity

A minor detail that is not mentioned in this latest gushing story about solar panels in Geneva.

[New York Times] Green Diplomacy on Display at U.S. Mission

What exactly is this trivial amount of overpriced clean electricity displacing? Well, other clean electricity.

Source: [IEA]

(There are also large imports and exports, but they mostly cancel out.)

This renders the claimed CO2 savings rather suspect...

I am perpetually exasperated that this, and other enormous success stories of cheap, clean, electricity, are completely ignored. "Green journalists" are absolutely silent on them - the minor detail of Switzerland eradicating fossil-fuel electricity isn't even a humble footnote in the NYT article. (The solar panels, of course, are highly newsworthy.)

I do not think there is a massive conspiracy of eco-nuts to sabotage environmental efforts. No cause to assume malice when simple ignorance suffices (oh, and how it suffices...)

The solar panels' cost, incidentally, is an epic $1.6 M for 116 kW capacity. At averaged 366 kWh/day output the capacity factor is 13% - so, $105/W average output.

At the August 31 ceremony, SIG presented the U.S. mission with a symbolic check for 76,000 Swiss francs (approximately $60,000) representing the amount of electricity SIG expects to purchase from the mission over the coming year.

http://www.america.gov/st/washfile-english/2005/September/20050901181029cwniktebul0.7067987.html

At a bizarre price of 45 cents/kWh.

A short tangent into energy politics

In the US: the White House "green jobs Czar" (?) has resigned over some rather crazy things. One, his past affiliation with a communist revolutionary group (no, I'm not editorializing - read the darn article); and two, over his signing a petition claiming George Bush orchestrated the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

[New York Times] White House Adviser on ‘Green Jobs’ Resigns

Appointed as a special adviser for “green jobs” by President Obama, Mr. Jones did not go through the traditional vetting process for administration officials who must be confirmed by the Senate. So it was not until recently that some of Mr. Jones’s past actions received broad airing, including his derogatory statements about Republicans in February and his signature on a 2004 letter suggesting that former President George W. Bush might have knowingly allowed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to occur in order to use them as a “pre-text to war.”

...

Mr. Jones’s involvement in the 1990s with a group called Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement had prompted recent accusations by conservative critics that he associated with Communists. The group, according to a post-mortem written by some of its founders, was an anti-capitalist, antiwar organization committed to achieving “solidarity among all oppressed peoples” with “direct militant action.”

(edit: for some reason NYT removed the link to the "STORM" position paper. The article had linked to it on the words "post-mortem")

In Ecuador: the Chevron case judge accused of bribery has recused himself, at the request of the Attorney General. A deputy judge is replacing him. No news yet of criminal investigation.

[Wall Street Journal] Judge in Chevron Case Agrees to Step Aside

The recusal is a significant victory for Chevron, which has argued that the Ecuadorian judicial system is too corrupt to render a fair verdict in the long-running environmental lawsuit. The move could delay a ruling in the case, which had been expected by the end of the year and was widely expected by both sides to be against the San Ramon, Calif., oil company.

And in an Orwellian twist: Ecuador's "Office of Government Transparency" is investigating the secret recording of party officials discussing bribes, because it was done without their consent...

[Forbes] Ecuador judge, Chevron dispute secret recordings

Meanwhile the chief of the office of Government Transparency, Esteban Rubio, is apparently looking into whether the secret tapes were illegally made or obtained.

"There has been an absolute irresponsibility in the way Chevron is acting," Rubio told Sonorama radio. "That clandestine recording, that video, constitutes a crime of espionage, a planned piece of theater staged to prolong the case."

Nuclear power on ScienceBlogs

Oh dear.

Some frighteningly stupid commentator wrote an essay, and some blogger linked to it. I'd hardly bother mentioning this, except that for some reason SB's editors (I think these would be the Seed editors also) highlighted it as "editor's pick".

[World's Fair] Nuclear is not "the answer"; slowing down in a sped-up culture is an act of resistance; and more from Rebecca Solnit

Well, the first problem is that they still think like big science—that there is “the answer.” In fact, there are hundreds of little answers that don’t include nuclear, including scaling back our consumption and travel and building better and using a lot of the elegant new engineering to do everything more efficiently and actually doing something about all the renewable energy sources that are out there—maybe having a new renewable/sustainable energy project like the Manhattan Project or race to the moon if they want some big-science action.

And goes on to toss a few regurgitated falsehoods ("takes insane amounts of carbon-producing endeavor to mine and refine..."), before moving on to the "political content of art and writing".

"Editor's pick", of course.

Built on Facts wrote a short counter:

[Built on Facts] Nuclear Power

(By the way, for those who aren't familiar with SB, I think by far the best feature is "Blogging on Peer Review" (feed here) which is researchers expositing new peer-reviewed articles in their field, to a general audience. This is a gem of the internet: very good science writing, by actual scientists and not utter hacks like in most real-world science reporting.)

While on this subject I think I should mention Shell. They have a curious relationship with SB. They have twice, in history, sponsored rather inane energy blogs on SB (as well as elsewhere, e.g. in Discover magazine). I'm not sure why SB agreed to this. Joe Romm was a blogger on the first one; I don't think much of the other writers either. Rather strangely, both blogs are now defunct.

Shell blog #1: (July-October 2008):

Next Generation Energy

Shell blog #2 (April-August 2009):

The Energy Grid

China 2020

I keep running into very enthusiastic articles applauding the scope and growth of China's clean energy sector. The usual theme is "so-and-so by 2020!" This is dangerous delusion.

Here's a table to put things in perspective. It collects together the various projections for China in 2020 - in which timeframe it will double its electricity generation.

Source	2020 nameplate capacity	est. average output
Wind	100 GW	30 GW
Solar	20 GW	4 GW
Hydro	300 GW	100 GW
Nuclear	86 GW	78 GW
Total	1,600 GW	900 GW

Credit EIA (source)

(The current capacity factor, nationwide, is about 56%. I used generic capacity factors for other figures.)

The real winner is hidden in the gaps: coal. This debunks the rosy optimism of every journalist reporting on the subject - I imagine it is a professional requirement in that field to be innumerate.

But the extreme inadequacy of the wind and solar projects doesn't bother me much - it's a given. It's the nuclear figure which is disturbing. I keep seeing China brought up as the "success story" of the nuclear resurrection - but this isn't success! This is, in the final verdict, complete failure!

Why is this? Why is Chinese nuclear growth - real and projected - so far behind coal? And what are the impliciations for global warming?

Obviously we need not question China's commitment to carbon emissions:

IEA reference scenario (source)

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - China's carbon emissions will start to fall by 2050, its top climate change policymaker said... The comments by Su Wei did not indicate at what level emissions would top out.

http://www.reuters.com/article/GCA-GreenBusiness/idUSTRE57E0BA20090815

But even without the CO2-policy advantage, why is nuclear losing so profoundly to coal on this playing field? Is it intrinsic growth limitations (unlikely - just look at France in the 1980's). Cost? Perhaps, I think it's quite well established that straight (non-CCS) coal is rather cheaper than LWRs. Or some other factor?

What is the economic reason that coal is outgrowing nuclear power in China 5 to 1?

We need to stop congratulating ourselves and realize - we're in a disaster, and nuclear power is failing us.

Credit James Hansen (source)

We can't argue that nuclear power is cheap and competitive under the idealistic policy of straight carbon taxes - when the super-polluters of China and India (80%+ coal each) have no intention of agreeing with such policy. Actually, neither do the US or EU, to be blunt, although our political sleazebags seem to have convinced everyone otherwise. (Waxman-Markey... oh that is brilliant.)

We can't argue that we can coerce the developing world into such a heavily regressive system, because, even if such a thing weren't morally reprehensible (who would steal heating coal from a poor Chinese farmer?), the first world has no such collective power, legislative or economic.

We can't argue that the existing nuclear industry is preparing to save the world, because they are conservative and unambitious. Let's be frank: there's nice progress in nuclear expansion, but it's 2-3 orders of magnitude short of actually making the difference - not a difference, but the difference, the one that saves the world. Even the wildest paper projections of the nuclear "renaissance" don't amount to but a fraction of world energy. Just ask WNA:

A WNA projection shows at least 1100 GWe of nuclear capacity by 2060, and possibly up to 3500 GWe, compared with 373 GWe today.

(And for that matter, how many first-world nuclear providers are seriously researching closed fuel cycles? Fast breeders in France? No, they gave that up; they're reduced to pushing piddling percentage points with MOX fuel.)

What's the critical timescale of climate change anyway? It seems the most-repeated figure is 10 years. I really hope that's wrong; that's just 2020.

So how exactly does fission power, the only hope of averting catastrophic climate change, avail us? Where does theoretical ability meet economic reality?

(update): it occurred to me, that while I show two separate graphs of Chinese electricity - historical generation (from EIA), and a future extrapolation (from IEA) - it would be more readable to present them as one graph. So here I've superimposed them, re-scaled and offset to a common grid:

Yikes! (And this is still ultimately cynical: e.g. U.S. electric consumption is 12.5 MWh/year per capita, so the current Chinese population would consume 16,600 TWh/year at US-parity. So the IEA must be assuming the Chinese economy does not reach US levels very soon.)

Ecuadorian President, judge impliciated in bribe scheme over $27 billion Chevron lawsuit

New York Times: Chevron Offers Evidence of Bribery Scheme in Ecuador Lawsuit

Washington Post: Chevron Alleges Bribery in Ecuador Suit

Chevron said Monday that it had been given videos of three meetings, including one in which the judge, Juan Núñez, appears to say he will rule against Chevron, and that the company's appeals would be denied even though the trial is still in progress. The company posted the videos and transcripts in English and Spanish on its Web site.

In another, Patricio Garcia, who claims to be the political coordinator for the presidency and an official in Ecuador's ruling Alliance Country party, suggests that lawyers from the executive branch had been sent to help the judge write his decision. Garcia also asks two contractors seeking cleanup contracts to pay $3 million, which he says would be evenly divided between the judge, "the presidency," and the plaintiffs. And he implicates the sister of President Rafael Correa in the scheme.