GETTING

POWER
By Matthew L. Wald

TO THE PEOPLE
Nuclear energy? Carbon capture? Solar power? As the debate over climate change heats up and the demand for energy grows, what is the best alternative? The answer lies in the marketplace.

TABLES AND CHARTS BY BULLETIN STAFF

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Climate change has the nuclear power industry buzzing that it is poised for a worldwide renaissance. This by itself is not news; the industrys publicists are notorious optimists, and they have been predicting a spurt in construction since long before the threat of rising global temperatures became a priority issue. But fundamental shifts in the world energy marketplace make the talk a little more serious nowand, paradoxically, a lot more speculative. The subject is hot because climate change is becoming a fixation. Some of the most dire predictions come from analysts who sound like they are channeling Thomas Malthus, who wrote in 1798 that food supply increased arithmetically while population, geometrically. Today, he would write about geometrical increases in energy use and carbon production. In fact, population need not increase at all to cause the problem, according to Robert Socolow, who is the coprincipal investigator of Princeton Universitys Carbon Mitigation Initiative. He divides humanity into fifths, based on income. The top three-fifths, he calculates, with incomes from $7,000 up, are responsible for 75 percent of carbon emissions. At present there are about 1.3 billion people in that category, and in 2030 it will be about 2.5 billion. Sixty percent will be from the developing worldoutside North America, Europe, Japan, Korea, and Australia.1 Thus carbon limitation regimes enforced in places with effective governments might not cover the bulk of the problem. How then does nuclear power fit into this picture? Placing a bet is sketchy because of multiple changes now under way. Imagine predicting the outcome of a chess match, where the pieces learn new moves every round, or the board keeps changing shape. One change is the price of nonrenewable alternatives, such as oil, coal, and natural gaswhich are all up lately in a free market and could be pushed higher by carbon taxes. Another is the degree to which the two
Vol. 63, No. 5, pp. 26-43, 63 DOI: 10.2968/063005008

great energy markets, for stationary applications and transportation fuel, are tied together. Electricity is the link; more and more of the worlds energy is converted to electricity before it is consumed, and that is the kind of energy that todays nuclear reactors make. In years to come, electricity will expand its reach, and reactors and other electricity generators will make power that bites into the transportation fuels market. Some reactors could charge batteries, or ultra-capacitors, to turn electricity into transportation fuel. Just over the horizon are other reactors that might also make hydrogen, rather than electricity. The hydrogen could be used as an energy carrierfor example, the form in which energy is loaded into a vehicles fuel cellor could be used to process hydrocarbons, or maybe just carbon, for reuse in an internal combustion engine. Such a cycle would have low carbon emissions. But the problem for people who want to sell and build nuclear reactors (or anything else that makes power, for that matter) is that the supply side of energy is a moving target, and lately moving faster. The price of wind energy is dropping; ditto the price of energy from solar production, both photovoltaic (in which sunlight striking a silicon-based material produces current) and solar thermal (a smokeand-mirrors trick without the smoke, in which mirrors concentrate the suns power to boil water). And lately there is another competitor: biofuel. Ethanol from corn can be a player, but only if its value in the transportation field is higher than its value as animal feed. Thus agriculture is now part of the energy production equation. Ethanol from corn cannot have a big impact on the overall energy marketplace (for one thing, it takes about as much energy, and carbon dioxide, to make as the finished product contains). But ethanol from cellulose is a likely competitor in the next few years, and it will, if successful, displace some of the petroleum and natural gas now used for transportation fuel. Those fuels might then be available for generating electricity. Likewise,

OPPOSITE PAGE: ISTOCKPHOTO; ALL ICONS: FELIX SOCKWELL

biofuels could transform the electricity market directly, by substituting for coal or natural gas in generating stations. The success of any of these renewable energy forms is contingent on cold, hard economics. So is the fate of a host of smaller renewable competitors that exist in niche markets, in prototype, in the demonstration stage, or just in the imagination of entrepreneurs, such as geothermal power, tidal power, or reactors running on plutonium recovered by reprocessing spent nuclear fuel. Governments can build anything they want to, but in a globalized marketplace, no technology will dominate without at least a patina of economic advantage. Meanwhile, the fuels market increasingly works like the electricity market in those parts of the United States that have restructured; there is a bidding system (hour by hour for electricity, year by year for some other competitions) and a clearing price. Anything that can be produced below the clearing price will be accepted and earn profits; anything above it will not get used, or, in some cases, will not get built. And when it comes to construction, the issue is not just cost, but also expectation of cost and risk of cost escalation. This does not favor capitalintensive projects with long lead times, like reactors. So what does it take to make reactors a superior option? Enough so that risk of accident or proliferation, and uncertainty of waste disposal, look like acceptable penalties? Or, looked at from the other side, what does it take to make reactors financially irrelevant? It is no longer just the price of a million British thermal units (BTU, which measure energy content) from coal or natural gas, because the number of BTU needed to make a kilowatt-hour keeps dropping. Another major component is the price of a ton of carbon dioxide. The United States now implicitly values carbon
Matthew L. Wald is a reporter at the New York Times , where he has been writing about energy since 1979.
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dioxide at about $20 per ton, based on the 1.9-cents-per-kilowatt-hour credit for carbon-free electricity it gives to wind and solar, and is offering to nuclear power. Various studies predict higher charges will come later, to induce the changes needed in the economy to bring emissions down. Along with knowing the price of a million BTU of fuel and the tax on a ton of carbon, anyone who wants to predict the future has to know the value of electric capacity, as opposed to energy. This is a slippery concept that is not well understood by many advocates of renewables. Electricity that is available on a predictable basiswhether or not the sun is shining or wind is blowing is worth more than electricity that is only available at natures whim. And right now the cost increment to move it from one category to the other (making solar power available at night, for example) is very high. A wind farm capable of generating 1,000 megawatts will have a capacity factor under 30 percent in most locations and will never be firm capacity; in contrast, a 1,000-megawatt nuclear reactor will have a capacity factor of about 90 percent, and the owners get to choose when it is not running. (Capacity factor is an industry term meaning the ratio of power actually produced to what would have resulted from aroundthe-clock, 100-percent production.) Low capacity factors are acceptable if the energy is cheap, but only to the
ENERGY BASICS

extent that they fit in with a utilitys need to meet peak demand. No matter how low the price of a kilowatthour from wind, a utility with a peak demand on a windless summer afternoon would not use windmills to meet that need. Also in the mix is national risk tolerance, which involves not just the risk of meltdown, but also the risk of disruption of oil or gas supplies and the risk of not being able to sequester carbon dioxide reliably. At least the United States has a regulatory structure for nuclear waste storage, if not an actual working repository. In contrast, a utility that pumped carbon dioxide underground would face eternal liabilitynot an attractive prospect for a commercial enterprise. Even if all of this leaves us with a crystal-clear understanding of our energy options, there is yet another variable: the extent to which climate change might alter the amount of renewable energy that can be generated. A 2002 Rand Corporation study of the prospects for renewable energy in the Pacific Northwest pointed out that the regions conventional hydro generation can fluctuate annually by 20 percent, based on rainfall patterns.2 Rainfall, along with temperature, is also key to growing crops for biofuels. (Changes in rainfall could also trigger new demand for making fresh water from the sea. Most power plants that do that today use copious amounts of fossil fuels.) And in theory, climate change could also make

deserts cloudy, reducing solar power production. Climate is also key to energy demand. In 1990, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), a nonprofit consortium based in Palo Alto, California, calculated that a temperature increase of slightly less than 1 degree Celsius by 2015 would require utilities in the southeast United States and New York to have 1020 percent more generating capacity.3 More recently, in 2005 an EPRI researcher argued that if temperatures rise 9.714.4 degrees Fahrenheit higher by 2050, peak demand could rise by 63 percent.4 Underlying such scenarios is the absence of a guarantee that carbon emissions will be reduced enough to stabilize the climate, or even slow the rate of climate change. Depending on who is doing the counting, China either passed the United States this year in carbon dioxide production or will do so soon; India is not far behind. The direction of climate change in the future may turn out to depend on their willingness to implement large-scale solutions. Those solutions are likely to be demonstrated first in the United States, which has the intellectual and financial capitaland political willto develop low-carbon technologies. But effectiveness will require more than switching to compact fluorescent light bulbs. So, with demand rising, fuel prices shifting, technology changing, and policy uncertain, whats a small planet to do?

KILOWATT-HOUR (KWH) Unit of measurement typically used to describe the quantity of electricity consumed; 1 kilowatt-hour can power a window air conditioner for about one hour; a U.S. household used an average of 10,654 kilowatt-hours in 2001. MEGAWATT-HOUR (MWH)

One thousand kilowatt-hours; usually describes the quantity of electricity produced by a power plant. The unit typically is used in the wholesale market.

HYDROCARBON Class of organic compounds, including crude oil, natural gas, and coal, that consist of carbon and hydrogen. The burning of hydrocarbons produces carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. LOAD CURVE

Graph illustrating the amount of electricity consumed by users over time; electricity providers use this information to forecast how much electricity is needed at different times of the day and different months of the year.

CAPACITY FACTOR The measure of a power plants actual output compared to the full potential output over a given period of time, usually a year.

Gallon of fuel oil . . . . . . . . . . . . . .149,690 Gallon of crude oil . . . . . . . . . . . .138,095 Gallon of gasoline . . . . . . . . . . . . .125,000 Gallon of gasohol* . . . . . . . . . . . .120,900 Gallon of ethanol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84,400 Cubic foot of natural gas . . . . . . . . .1,021 Ton of wood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . > 9,000,000 Ton of coal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . >16,200,000 * (10% ETHANOL, 90% GASOLINE)

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SOURCE: ENERGY BASICS/ENERGY INFORMATION ADMINISTRATION

BRITISH THERMAL UNIT (BTU) Unit of measurement used to describe the energy content of materials; 1 kilowatt-hour of electricity provides 3,413 BTU.

FUEL

ENERGY (BTU)

Policy makers sometimes look at the options as if theyre competing with each other. But there is less to this competition than meets the eye. It is true that at various times in history, nuclear, coal, and gas companies have competed with one another. However, those that burn coal to make electricity are not, for the most part, competing with the companies that split uranium to make electricitythey are those companies, since most commercial power generators worldwide use a variety of fuels. Sometimes, they are the same people; take Michael W. Rencheck, senior vice president of engineering at American Electric Power, the largest coal user in the United States. Rencheck recently testified before Congress that the price of carbon capture can be driven down, given enough time. But while coal is his specialty, he recognizes other strategies; he is a former senior reactor operator at the companys D.C. Cook nuclear reactor. I believe youre going to do both, he says. An inventory of coal plants already operating guarantees the need for add-on technology to capture carbon, he explains, because nuclear plants simply cannot replace them all. And adding capture technology could be less risky than building a reactor. A new reactor might be 1,500 megawatts, at a price of anywhere from $2,000 a kilowatt to $4,000 a kilowatt. How many companies can withstand $3 billion, $4.5 billion, or $6 billion? Thats heavy lift,

he observes. Phil Clapp, the president of the National Environmental Trust, has lately been touring Washington, D.C., with retired Vice Adm. Dennis McGinn to talk about energy conservation and carbon reduction. The problem is not going to be solved by individual solutions, says Clapp. Were going to have to develop a new mousetrap, that in some fashion gets equity among countries, and gets reductions. McGinn chimes in that the simple invention of the mousetrap was necessary but not sufficient. First, you have to view mice as a threat, he notes. What will it cost to catch the mice? At the optimistic end is the May 4, 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which said that for the most stringent mitigation strategieswhich would hold global greenhouse gas concentrations in the range of 445535 parts per million (450 ppm in the atmosphere would be equal to about 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels) the costs would amount to about a 0.12-percent reduction in average annual economic growth.5 A cochairman of the study, Bert Metz, a senior researcher at the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency described it in an e-mail in several ways. If global gross domestic product (GDP) is assumed to be 80 percent higher in 2030 than it is today, he explains, the strong mitigation actions would reduce the increase to 77 percent. Or, he says, the 80 percent increase would be delayed until

2031 rather than 2030. But that is still a lot of money. The CIA World Factbook estimates global GDP at $66 trillion in 2006.6 An 80 percent increase would be $119 trillion; 3 percent of that amount is about $3.6 trillion. A skeptic might ask how poor countries would pay their share, but it may not get to that point; rich countries might not pay, either. For example, last May, Cong. Ralph Hall of Texas, the senior Republican member of the House Science and Technology Committee, in a hearing on a report by the IPCC, declared: When I return to my congressional district, constituents have one thing high on their listthe high price of gasoline. We need to be looking at ways to lower this cost, not raise it. And yet, the scenarios being discussed today propose raising the price of gasoline substantially. . . . We must not lose sight of other pressing national priorities and understand the overall burden of all national needs on the average citizen. Opinions of elected leaders worldwide could change as the wind blows warmer, but solutions that cost a lot of money will likely spark resistance. Another approach is what environmentalists used to call, before the consensus on global warming became so strong, a no regrets approach: steps that pay for themselves whether or not one believes that greenhouse gas emissions will turn out to be a problem. There is still a market for the better mousetrap. Around the world, companies will probably try a lot of mousetraps,

WORLD ENERGY USE BY FUEL TYPE, 19802030

SOURCE: WORLD MARKETS/INTERNATIONAL ENERGY OUTLOOK, 2007, ENERGY INFORMATION ADMINISTRATION

Increasing energy demand during the coming decades will spur growth in the use of all fuel types. But experts believe that the fuels in greatest use todayoil, coal, and natural gaswill maintain their grip on the marketplace. Growth in nuclear and renewable energy are expected to make up a small part of future energy use.

250 LIQUIDS COAL NATURAL GAS RENEWABLES NUCLEAR

200

QUADRILLION BTU

150

100

50

1980

HISTORY

2004

PROJECTIONS

2030

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doing a little of everything that we can think of now, and some things we havent thought of yet.

TYPICAL LOAD CURVE WITH SUMMER AIR CONDITIONING

GROWTH OF COAL DEMAND

500

During a 24-hour period, electricity demand rises and falls consistent with daily activities.
SIZE OF LOAD (MW)

PEOPLE GET HOME, PREPARE DINNER, WATCH TV, ETC. MILLION METRIC TONS

400

CHINA REST OF THE WORLD

300

PEOPLE GET UP, PREPARE BREAKFAST, ETC.

200

MOST AIR CONDITIONERS RUN DURING THE HOTTEST PART OF THE DAY

100

0 OFFICES, FACTORIES, AND STORES OPEN

12 AM

6 AM

NOON

6 PM

12 AM

-100

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

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SOURCE: LOAD CURVE/THE U.S. ELECTRIC POWER SECTOR AND CLIMATE CHANGE MITIGATION, JUNE 2005, THE PEW CENTER ON GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE, GRANGER MORGAN, JAY APT, AND LESTER LAVE OF CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY; SOURCE: GROWTH OF COAL DEMAND/AREVA, NP INC.

There is intermittent talk of peak oil but none of peak coal. The United States, the worlds biggest energy user, has hundreds of years worth of coal in the ground, so much that it makes very little economic sense to bother looking for more. Other countries also have huge coal deposits. Globally, coal meets 25 percent of energy demand (more than three times nuclears share, and about 80 times the combined share of solar, geothermal, and wind). A recent MIT study found that the United States has the equivalent of five hundred 500megawatt coal plants, and China is adding two of that size every week, each producing about 3 million tons of carbon dioxide per year.7 The reason is obvious. Coal sells for $1$2 per million BTU, an amount of heat sufficient to generate about 110 kilowatt-hours. The energy-equivalent amount of natural gas and oil sell for $6$12. A million BTU of gas has about half the carbon dioxide of coal, and the amount per kilowatt-hour is even smaller, because gas can be burned at higher efficiency, so more kilowatt-hours can be squeezed out of the same amount of heat. A million BTU of oil gives off an amount of carbon dioxide about halfway between

coal and gas, but advanced economies save the oil for fueling transportation, not electricity production. In addition, coal deposits are very widely distributed, and coal is easier to move to power plants than gas. A modern coal-burning power plant emits about 1.9 pounds of carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour of electricity. (Old ones emit more, and in a few years, new ones could emit slightly less, as engineers push pressures and temperatures higher to achieve greater efficiencies.) The gas in the stack, like the air going in, is mostly nitrogen, but about 12 percent is carbon dioxide. Already in industrial use, though, are chemical processes that capture the carbon dioxide. They do so only where there is a market for carbon dioxide. The highest-value uses are in food processing, where carbon dioxide is compressed into a liquid and then dumped into a chamber with fresh food. As the liquid expands back to a gas, it absorbs heat, flash-freezing the food. It is also used for dry-ice production. Generally, chemical processes to capture carbon involve mixing an absorbent chemical at low temperature into the flue gases. Once the chemical has absorbed the carbon dioxide, it is separated and heated, so it gives the gas off again. The problem is that the chemical system comes with a very large energy penalty, about 30 percent. The penalty can be taken either as steam or electricity, which is needed to heat the absorbent chemical to make it give off the carbon dioxide and then chill it

again. Adding a carbon capture system to an existing coal-burning plant may mean diverting so much steam that the turbinethe device that sits between the boiler and the electric generator and turns heat energy into mechanical energyno longer runs efficiently. Another approach is to turn the flue gas into pure carbon dioxide by limiting what goes into the boiler in the first place. Flue gas, like air itself, is primarily nitrogen. Rather than separate the carbon dioxide from the nitrogen at the back end, engineers can separate the oxygen from the nitrogen at the front end. But the standard way to do this is also an energy nightmare. The two gases each condense into liquid, but at different temperatures, and making the oxygen is energy intensive. The air is usually chilled to 185 degrees Celsius below zero.8 Eventually, engineers may come up with a better method, including a membrane that sorts oxygen from nitrogen. Such membranes are already available for lung patients who need oxygen, but they are not yet practical on an industrial scale. Meanwhile, the federal government is test-driving another technology, called integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC). Two IGCC plants are running already, built in large part to demonstrate control of conventional pollutants, like sulfur and particulates. These are easier to clean up in an IGCC plant because they are removed before combustion, when the gas stream is smaller and cooler. But neither of the existing plants separates its carbon.

SOURCE: RATIO OF CO2 EMISSIONS, 19902095, TO MAXIMUM POTENTIAL GEOLOGIC STORAGE CAPACITY/ELECTRIC POWER RESEARCH INSTITUTE, INC; NEXT PAGESOURCE: VOLUME OF PROJECT-BASED CARBON TRADING/THE WORLD BANK.

A government-private sector consortium called FutureGen, authorized by the 2005 Energy Policy Act, is moving toward construction of a coal plant that will add that step. But it requires competitive site selection and bidding, environmental impact statements, and other bureaucratic complications of government work, so it is moving slowly. The existing IGCC plants burn coal in a gas turbine. (The power-generation technology can be confusing; gas refers to the form of the fuel, not the fuel itself, so that a gas turbine can burn natural gas, or, as is done on an airplane, kerosene-like petroleum.) IGCC uses a process that dates back more than a century to pump oxygen into a chemical reactor and cook the hydrocarbon of coal into two constituent gases: molecular hydrogen (in the form of H2) and carbon monoxide (CO), a mixture called synthesis gas. Carbon monoxide is familiar as a pollutant in ambient air, but it is also a very good fuel gas. In the IGCC plants today, the two gases go through a jet engine, and the exhaust gases are used to boil water, making steam that turns a turbine, making more electricity. In that operation, they resemble combined cycle plants fired by natural gas. For carbon sequestration, though, another step is needed before the gas goes to the turbine: the carbon monoxide must be converted. It is mixed with steam in a reaction that produces more molecular hydrogen and carbon dioxide, a process familiar in

industry called a water-gas shift reaction. When that hydrogen is combined with the hydrogen produced directly in coal gasification, the result is a pollution-free stream of gas going to the turbine. And, as at a coal plant that uses a chemical system to grab carbon dioxide from the flue gases, the result is a pure stream of carbon dioxide that can be pressurized into a liquid and pumped underground for sequestration. There are complications, though. Pure hydrogen is difficult to burn because the flame front tends to crawl back toward the nozzle, and the combustion temperature is high. One solution is to take pure nitrogen (leftover from the first stage, where oxygen was made to cook the coal) and run it through the turbine with the hydrogen and oxygen. Early in 2007, the MIT study The Future of Coal: Options for a Carbon Constrained World identified IGCC with capture as the leading candidate for coal but said it was critical that the government research, development, and deployment program not fall into the trap of picking a technology winner, especially at a time when there is great coal combustion and conversion development activity underway in the private sector in both the United States and abroad.9 The MIT study put the cost of capturing a metric ton of carbon dioxide from a pulverized coal plant in the range of $40. It put the cost for IGCC lower, about $24 per metric ton. But

the numbers are for capture, not storage, and the report specifies that both are estimates based on the current understanding of the technology. The study authors also assume that the first few plants have been built and the bugs worked out of the system. With the same caveats, the MIT study puts the price of a kilowatt-hour from a new coal plant without capture at about 4.8 cents; with capture, 7.7 cents. Using oxygen in a pulverized coal plant of modern design would lower the cost per kilowatt-hour to about 7 cents, and IGCC with capture to about 6.5 cents. Capture is not perfect but is in the range of 90 percent. The assumption is that storage of carbon is near-perfect, although this remains to be demonstrated. Among the issues identified in the MIT study is legal liability. What commercial enterprise would pump carbon underground if its liability were eternal? The idea is to push the carbon dioxide down into a saline aquifer, a layer that is deep and, as far as anyone can now figure, useless as a target for future resource recovery operations. But will this be accepted by people in the area? Will the not in my backyard reaction morph into not under my backyard? Before that question is reached, though, there is another: Will people pay more? In the United States, millions of people have volunteered to pay extra to buy wind energy and presumably would be willing to pay more for low-carbon energy, no matter its

RATIO OF CO2 EMISSIONS, 19902095, TO MAXIMUM POTENTIAL GEOLOGIC STORAGE CAPACITY

CANADA AUSTRALIA UNITED STATES FORMER SOVIET UNION MIDDLE EAST WESTERN EUROPE EASTERN EUROPE AFRICA LATIN AMERICA INDIA SOUTHEAST ASIA CHINA KOREA JAPAN 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%

AMPLE CO2 STORAGE CAPACITY

Power plants in each region emit CO2, but not all regions have the capacity to store those emissions if they were sequestered. For example, experts believe the 19902095 emissions of Korea and Japan will exceed their storage capacities.

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source. But the problem is not limited to the United States, and solving the problem here will make little difference unless the solution carries over to other countries. As the MIT report notes, while U.S. energy consumption is rising by about 1.6 percent per year, Chinese consumption is surging by 4.2 percent per year. At least for coal used in power plants, there is a theoretical path forward. But the extreme difference in price per million BTU is raising calls to use coal to substitute not only for natural gas, which is three to six times costlier, but also for oil. Making liquid transportation fuel from coal is well established. The process was invented by Franz Fischer and Hans Tropsch in the 1920s and begins much like the process for IGCC plants, with cooking coal into a gas of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. Then the carbon and hydrogen atoms are linked together into hydrocarbon chains. These can substitute for diesel or for components of gasoline. The Nazis used this process to fuel their tanks during World War II. The South African regime used it during Apartheid, when faced with an oil embargo. A South African firm, Sasol, produces the fuel now, making its synthesis gas from natural gas rather than coal. It advertises that its fuel is cleaner than the cleanest conventional diesel. But when made from coal, the fuel, known as F-T diesel, is responsible for about twice as many grams of carbon dioxide per mile as ordinary diesel. With some effort, the carbon dioxide can be

captured and sequestered, making the resulting fuel only as bad as ordinary diesel. Producers say that F-T diesel is competitive with oil prices above $60 a barrel. Around the world, at least some of that production is likely to skip the capture-and-sequester step. There is another option, though, for turning coal into transportation fuel. If a power plant puts its synthesis gas through the water-gas shift reaction, as is done in IGCC with carbon capture, it might use the resulting hydrogen for power or transportation fuel. The plant might produce synthesis gas and then hydrogen around the clock, but might, as a conventional plant does now, power the turbine at varying loads through the course of the day and the year, as demand for electricity varies. Higher utilization of at least part of the plant would be a financial boon to the owners. Here too, though, the carbon impact is not guaranteed to be positive, even if the hydrogen is produced with hardly any carbon emissions. The hydrogen could be used in a fuel-cell vehicle, with no carbon emissions. But hydrogen has other uses, especially as the world supply of oil dwindles. It can be used to convert the heaviest part of the oil barrel, the part now useful mostly as asphalt, into a transportation-grade liquidwhich, in turn, would pump more carbon into the atmosphere. Reuel Shinnar, a professor of chemical engineering at the City College of New York, has estimated that using hydrogen for

hydrocracking and hydrotreating (two well-established refinery technologies) could raise the yield of a barrel of oil by 20 percent. The United States could save 3 million barrels of oil a day, he estimates.10

Nuclear power has always had its partisans and its opponents. Lately some of the debate takes on the tone of discussing a colonoscopy: No one is enthusiastic, but as the years go by, more people see the benefits. I take the climate issue so seriously I think we cant rule out nuclear power, says Jonathan Lash, president of the World Resources Institute, who dutifully lists the associated problems of waste and proliferation. And some of the backing for new reactors is hardly monogamous. We love solar, we love wind, says Jim Hunter, director of the Utilities Department at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, at a session organized by the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, a group financed by the nuclear lobby. His union is a member. Like almost all energy technologies, reactors are a moving target. For example, a key measure of a power plants performance is capacity factor. When the current fleet was built, very few ran at a capacity factor above 75 percent, and most were in the 60 percent range. Now the average is near 90 percent. When they were built, the assumption was that they would run
GROSS NUCLEAR CAPACITY ADDITIONS (MW)

VOLUME OF PROJECT-BASED CARBON TRADING

600 MILLIONS OF METRIC TONS OF CO2 EQUIVALENTS

500

Since the 2005 start of the EU Emission Trading Scheme, which allows for the buying and selling of emission credits, the market for CO2 equivalents has grown remarkably.
VALUE OF 2006 CARBON TRANSACTIONS (MILLIONS OF DOLLARS)

400

300

200

100

EU Emission Trading Scheme . . 24,357 New South Wales . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225 Chicago Climate Exchange . . . . . . . . 38 UK Emission Trading Scheme . . . . . N /A TOTAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24,620
1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006

Additions to gross nuclear capacity slowed starting in the 1990s, due in part to the nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. France, Japan, and other Asian nations nuclear build-up comprises the bulk of new capacity since then.

70,000

60,000

50,000

40,000

30,000

20,000

10,000

0 19511960

32

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for 40 years. Now, more than half the U.S. plants have had their licenses extended for another 20 years, and some experts believe that they will run even beyond 60 years. That means that the staggering capital cost of a new reactor can be spread over many more megawatt-hours of production than previously imagined. And the next generation of plants is larger, in the range of 1,300 megawatts, lowering costs because the size of the staff is largely insensitive to the size of the plant. Some of the oldest plants now running are only 650 megawatts. The assumption among people who want to build is that a crop of new plants will run as well as the veteran ones now operating, which themselves are the winnowed survivors of a pack of clumsy adolescent reactors, one of which (Three Mile Island Unit 2) partially melted down, and several of which (Rancho Seco, Maine Yankee) were killed off like losing racehorses sent to the glue factory because of poor performance. The survivors, in fact, are doing brilliantly by the standards of the 1970s and 1980s. The Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO), a peerto-peer monitoring group established after the Three Mile Island accident, found that in 2006, the average number of unplanned shutdowns per reactor, per year fell to 0.42. In the 1970s and 1980s, it was common for a single plant to trip four times a year; today, a plant that shuts down that often gets extra inspections from the Nuclear

Regulatory Commission (NRC). According to INPO, the medial value for forced capacity loss ratethat is, loss of production because of shutdown or power limitation brought on by component failure or human errorwas 1.2 percent. And, from 19962006, collective radiation exposure to workers was down by about 40 percent.11 It is worth noting that the industrys goal for new reactors is quite modest. A few governments, especially Moscow and Washington, pursue advanced technologies such as reactors that use graphite instead of water to slow down the neutrons that sustain the chain reaction. That helps allow much higher temperatures, and thus higher efficiency. Some could split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen in their normal temperature rangea trick that would improve their usefulness immensely because they could produce hydrogen for transportation fuels or for the chemical industry. But these are government dreams, not commercial ones. The gleam that shines in the commercial industrys eye is simpler: optimization of the familiar light water technology, which uses ordinary water to slow down the neutrons and to carry off the heat of fission so it can be converted to steam and then electricity. With refinements such as locating emergency water supplies inside the containment building, and at an elevation higher than the reactor vessel, designers have found ways to sharply cut the amount of piping and number of valves, which reduces both cost and the possibilities

for failure. The industry maintains that the chance of a core-damage accident, already small, is 10100 times smaller in the new designs.12 Nuclear plants are not built by public opinion; they are built by welders, concrete pourers, and electricians, who are employed by managers who write checks, backed by wheeler- dealers who raise capital. But public opinion can play a role, and public opinion is changing. A survey commissioned by the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), the industrys trade association, polled 1,000 adults in March and April 2007 and found that 71 percent agreed that utilities should take steps now to prepare to build new reactors in the next decade if needed, and 66 percent said a new reactor next to an existing one would be acceptable.13 In Texas, TXU Corp. was trying until early 2007 to build 11 new plants that would have run on pulverized coal. Laura Miller, then the mayor of Dallas, helped lead a campaign that played a role in cutting the number of plants to three. Along the way, Miller looked at another alternative, nuclear reactors, and changed her viewpoint. Im a kid of the 70s that didnt like nuclear, she says. TXU gave me a tour of [the] Comanche Peak [nuclear power plant], and I loved it. What, exactly, a Texas utility would pay for a reactor is the next question. In 2002, Westinghouse said it could build a pair of twin AP-1000 models, one of the new generation, for less than $1,400 per kilowatt of capacity.14

FRANCE GERMANY JAPAN OTHER RUSSIA UNITED STATES

19611970

19711980

19811990

19912000

2001PRESENT

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33

NUCLEAR CAPACITY FACTOR

100%

REACTORS UNDER CONSTRUCTION

90%

U.S. nuclear operators have pushed their plants to produce a greater percentage of their potential output.

Where in the world is nuclear power undergoing an expansion?

ARGENTINA:

JAPAN:

1 2 1 1 2

BULGARIA: 80% CHINA: 70% FINLAND:

REPUBLIC OF KOREA:

4 1

PAKISTAN:

ROMANIA:

60%

INDIA:

6 1

UKRAINE:

50% 1980

IRAN: 1985 1990 1995 2000 2004

34

BU LLETI N OF TH E ATOM IC SC IEN TISTS

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SOURCE: NUCLEAR CAPACITY FACTOR/ELECTRIC POWER RESEARCH INSTITUTE; SOURCE: REACTORS UNDER CONSTRUCTION/INTERNATIONAL ATOMIC ENERGY AGENCY; PREVIOUS PAGESOURCE: GROSS NUCLEAR CAPACITY ADDITIONS (MW)/NUCLEAR POWER JOINT FACT-FINDING, JUNE 2007, THE KEYSTONE CENTER

The figure was for overnight cost, meaning it did not include interest charges during construction. But Joe C. Turnage, senior vice president of business development at Constellation Energy, parent company of the old Baltimore Gas & Electric, said in a presentation to financial analysts in New York last April that the estimated cost was $1,935 per kilowatt of capacity, not including interest or transmission upgrades or inflation during construction. Later that month, in a conference call with investors, Michael J. Wallace, an executive at Constellation and co-chief executive of UniStar Nuclear, which is Constellations joint venture with AREVA, put the cost at about $2,500 per kilowatt, including transmission upgrades. General Electric said in July that its newest model, being offered jointly with Hitachi, the Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor, would cost $2,000 to $3,000 per kilowatt, an enormous range. Its liars poker, says George VanderHeyden, president of UniStar. But UniStar feels confident enough to have ordered parts for its first reactor, even if it has not announced a firm plan to build it. But there may be some wiggle room. Turnage says that the combination of loan guarantees, insurance, and direct aid in the 2005 Energy Policy Act would allow production from a new reactor at $37 per megawatt-hour well below wholesale power prices in most of the United States, he adds. (Consumers buy by the kilowatt-hour, a quantity of energy sufficient to run a

window air conditioner for about an hour, or a personal computer for about seven hours. On the grid, the unit is the megawatt-hour, each of which is 1,000 kilowatt-hours.) But all these estimates assume that construction is smarter this time around. And there is a saying in the nuclear business that Murphy was a nuclear engineer. The first of the models that UniStar wants to build is under way in Olkiluoto, Finland. Soon after the first concrete was poured in the summer of 2005, problems with its strength and porosity were discovered. AREVA has now pushed back the schedule by 18 months.15 In a report commissioned by Greenpeace, four energy experts, including Peter A. Bradford, a former member of the NRC, calculated that average completion times had risen from 66 months in the mid-1970s to 116 months between 1995 and 2000. The longer construction times are symptomatic of a range of problems including managing the construction of increasingly complex reactor designs, the report said.16 And even the orders for parts (both UniStar and GE have placed orders) are not a real commitment. Its putting down a deposit for a time slot that you know you can sell to the Chinese if you dont want it, says Steve Creamer, the president and chief executive of Energy Solutions, LLC, a Salt Lake company that is a major processor of nuclear materials. The companies are getting in line and are confident they can auction off

their place in linebecause there is barely a manufacturing industry left. Nuclear reactor vessels, for example, are cast in rings and welded together. Several places can do the welding but only one can cast the largest pieces: Japan Steel Works. And companies that want reactors have to get in line behind companies that want heavy components for other uses. As such, the industry cannot sustain a nuclear renaissance on the scale now proposed. The manufacturing situation begins to resemble the chicken and egg problem of switching cars off gasoline; nobody will develop the supply chain until the market is there, and there will be no market without a supply chain. Last February, the National Association of Manufacturers called for beefing up the nations ability to make nuclear components.17 Its a pretty sad state of affairs that the Japanese are the only ones in the world today who can cast a reactor vessel, says Creamer. In fact, the supplier base is so withered that it calls into question the ability of the nuclear industry to make a meaningful contribution to reducing carbon dioxide emissions. The benchmarks are slippery, because no one knows how strong the growth will be in power demand. But consider an idea from Princetons Carbon Mitigation Initiative: the formulation of wedges, new or increased low-carbon energy sources or conservation efforts that will grow over time, so that the top of the fever line in the charttotal greenhouse gas emissionsstabilizes or falls. We need

SOURCE: NUCLEAR SHARE IN ELECTRICITY GENERATION/INTERNATIONAL ATOMIC ENERGY AGENCY; NEXT PAGESOURCE: HISTORICAL GROWTH IN WIND CAPACITY/THE U.S. ELECTRIC POWER SECTOR AND CLIMATE CHANGE MITIGATION, JUNE 2005, PREPARED FOR THE PEW CENTER ON GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE BY GRANGER MORGAN, JAY APT, AND LESTER LAVE OF CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY

seven or eight wedges, each removing a gigaton of carbon per year, according to the model. Nuclear could be one wedge if new and replacement nuclear capacity displaced high-carbon methods of energy production. That comes to roughly 1,070 gigawatts of capacity that would need to be built, equaling three times the worlds current nuclear capacity, or approximately 20 new 1,000-megawatt reactors per year over the next 50 years. Given the significantly lower historical rates of construction in the nuclear industry, the nuclear wedge looks like a challenge to build. The world hunts for a silver bullet, but nuclears caliber is too small. And the construction business may have to sprint just to keep market share. In the United States, nuclear maintained its share in the long drought of orders by running reactors another few months every year, raising the capacity factor to 90 percent from 60 percent, but that is a trend that has run its course. Plants also won NRC approval to raise their capacity by up to 20 percent by reanalyzing their safety margins and de-bottlenecking through bigger pumps or valves in a few locations, but that, too, has just about run its course. Now the industry has to build. Frank L. Skip Bowman, the chief executive of NEI, frequently cites the Energy Departments prediction that electricity demand will rise 50 percent by 2030. If true, that represents 300,000 megawatts, of which 60,000 would have to be nuclear, if it is to maintain its

20 percent share. That is somewhere around 50 additional reactors.18 Building more reactors also implies adding on to the nuclear waste problem, or at least, more need to rethink nuclear waste. But the waste problem is significant anyway. In the United States, with about half the operating reactors having won 20-year extensions on their original 40-year licenses, and the other half likely to apply, the planned repository at Yucca Mountain is already inadequate. The 1982 legislation that committed the federal government to handling nuclear waste envisioned two repositories, the second to be located in the east, but no one in Congress has the appetite to try to site another. Yucca itself may never happen, and the Energy Department has yet to apply for a license for the site, let alone survive the hearings that will follow. The solution for the next few decades at least is aboveground storage, mostly in steel-and-concrete casks, filled with inert gas to inhibit rust. These are sprouting adjacent to reactors, but a centralized site seems likely eventually. The Energy Department has a different solution in mind. In the longer term, it has grand plans for getting rid of the waste that continues to pile up. Called the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP), the initiative would use a chemical process to extract light radioactive elements and heavy radioactive isotopes (transuranics such as plutonium) from spent uranium fuel rods. The light elements would be stored on

the surface, while the heavy radioactive isotopes would be used as fuel for fast reactors, which use neutrons traveling thousands of times faster than those in todays reactors. After several cycles of reprocessing, the transuranics would fission into shorter-lived isotopes. But GNEP faces formidable technical obstacles. One is that fast reactors typically use molten sodium, rather than water, to reduce the speed of neutrons, and sodium burns on contact with water. In theory, the sodium does not contact water, but as it carries off the heat of a chain reaction, it is usually run through a heat exchanger with water on the other side. As a result, those reactors have a history of fires. And even if the reactor half can be worked out, the reprocessing half is still very challenging. Robert Alvarez, a former senior policy adviser to the Energy secretary and now the director of nuclear policy at the Institute for Policy Studies, recently calculated that even small quantities of the separated light elements would have to be diluted to a volume as large as 500 million cubic meters.19 A million cubic meters is the approximate volume of the Empire State Building.

Most power plants on the grid today were put there under the old Stalinist electric system that prevailed in the United States until the 1990s: A private but heavily regulated company

NUCLEAR SHARE IN ELECTRICITY GENERATION

NUCLEAR OTHER SOURCES

The countries that rely most on nuclear power are primarily in the developed world.

FRANCE 78.1%

LITHUANIA 72.3%

SLOVAK REPUBLIC 57.2%

REPUBLIC OF KOREA 38.6%

GERMANY 31.8%

JAPAN 30%

UNITED STATES 19.4%

BRITAIN 18.4%

RUSSIAN FEDERATION 15.9%

CANADA 15.8%

ARGENTINA 6.9%

SOUTH AFRICA 4.4%

BRAZIL 3.3%

INDIA 2.6%

CHINA 1.9%

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persuaded a state commission that there would be a need for the power and that the technology it was choosing was financially the best for local consumers. In a few states, air pollution became a factor, and the government put limits on the sulfur content of fuel. Then came national regulation of sulfur and nitrogen oxides, which are precursors of smog. Still, though, these were mostly enforced by states and driven by local or regional concerns over air pollution. For solar and wind power to gain a big market share, the pollutant of concern would have to be carbon dioxide. But carbon dioxide is much more complex. Despite its long-term impact on climate change, it has no apparent ill effects locally. If it did, states would pass laws to prohibit visitors from exhaling. The problem then is to make changes of no particular local benefit, although there may be a local cost. Such costs are likely, simply because it costs more to build a carbon-free plant, or a carbon-free plant will cause damage that another type would not. With wind turbines, for example, there are birds and bats chopped up by swirling wind turbine blades, or loss of pristine wilderness, and damage to what environmentalists sometimes call the viewshed, a regrettable term adapted from the earlier watershed. A National Academy of Sciences study released last May isolated the problem. The study was on wind, but there are analogues to other forms of carbon-free power. Try, for example, reading the following statement and

substituting the word nuclear for wind: A country as large and as geographically diverse as the United States and as wedded to political plurality and private enterprise is unlikely to plan for wind energy on a national scale in the same way as some European countries are doing. Nevertheless, nationallevel energy policies (implemented through such mechanisms as incentives, subsidies, research grants, and federal regulations and guidelines) to enhance the benefits of wind energy while minimizing the negative impacts would help in planning and regulating wind-energy development at smaller scales.20 The problem for both may be local sacrifice for global good. (A difference, of course, is the nature of the sacrifice, which is obvious for wind but in nuclear may take the form of accident risk, or simple fear of accident.) Wind, though, has other difficulties that limit its potential to help. For one, it is often poorly matched to energy need, at least as practiced so far in the United States. For example, it is Texas, not California, that is now the largest wind-producing state, and the wind developers went where the wind was, in west Texas. But west Texas misses the mark in two ways. First, geographically, it is on the opposite side of the state from the major power markets. Second, temporally, the wind blows strongest on winter nights, but the demand peaks on summer days. According to William Bojorquez, director of system planning at the grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of

Texas, on a summer peak day, every 100 megawatts of windmill capacity will produce fewer than 3 megawatts of electricity. So the state, he says, needs some other form of power to count on when it needs it most. Wind machines can save the coal that is burned on winter nights but cannot substitute for the coal plant itself; they become, in effect, like the bicycle that a commuter might use to get to work on sunny days. It may save gasoline, but the commuter will still need a car for rainy, snowy days. The analogy is imperfect, though, because bicycles cost a tiny fraction of the price of a car. Wind machines rival fossil fuel plants in their capital cost. To match production to need, wind developers have come up with the counterintuitive idea of moving to where the wind is not so strong, for example, on the shores. This is an important departure because the energy in the breeze rises in proportion to the square of the wind speed. On the shores, wind is much more predictable, in many areas picking up every afternoon as the sun differentially heats land and water, setting up wind currents that equalize air pressure. The idea has two other advantages: the area where towers and cables would go is unoccupied, and much of the worlds population, especially the energy-hungry population, lives near the coasts. That does not make coastal wind an easy option. Denmark has erected hundreds of offshore towers, but a more modest effort off the coast of
CASE STUDY: WIND POTENTIAL IN TEXAS

HISTORICAL GROWTH IN WIND CAPACITY

120

96 INSTALLED CAPACITY (GW)

Though comprising a small share of global capacity, wind power has attracted considerable investment.
U.S. EUROPE REST OF THE WORLD

72

48

24

0 1982

1990

1998

2003

2007

The largest of the lower 48 states contains a wide range of suitable locations for wind farmsmost of which are far from population centers, where energy demand is greatest. Locations atop the caprock and hilltops of the Texas panhandle contain the largest area of quality winds. Isolated sites in mountainous west Texas see the highest average wind speeds, but the wind intensity at such altitudes can change abruptly. Researchers have identified the moderate sea breezes along the states gulf coast as potentially suitable for commericial wind development.

36

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Massachusetts has run afoul of the aesthetic values of people who summer on Cape Cod and surrounding areas. A second proposal, for a large-scale wind farm off the Delaware coast, sits offshore where the elite of Washington, D.C., go when they retreat from the swampy capital. Wind energy in the United States gets a tax credit of 1.9 cents per kilowatt-hour, a subsidy that may be viewed as an early test of the effects of a carbon tax. Presuming that wind replaces coal-fired power, each kilowatt-hour saves about 1.9 pounds of carbon dioxide from a typical pulverized coal plantthat is, roughly one-thousandth of a ton. Hence, it mimics a carbon tax of $19 a ton. The result is that wind production quadrupled between 2000 and 2007 but still comes to much less than 1 percent of kilowatt-hours consumed in the United States. Still, nothing screams low carbon more than a wind turbine. Utilities like to say they have them. Private entrepreneurs induce ordinary residential customers to pay extra for an undifferentiated commodity, a kilowatthour, because it comes from wind. And the price per kilowatt of capacity compares favorably to some other sources. John W. Rowe, the chairman and chief executive of Exelon, one of the largest U.S. nuclear operators, said at a recent conference that the price per kilowatt of a conventional large coal plant is around $2,000, and that he believed a new reactor would cost $3,000$4,000 per kilowatt. Both

nuclear and coal have fuel costs and substantial labor costs. A wind farm has no fuel price and low maintenance costs, and costs $2,600$2,700 per kilowatt of capacity, he said. But he sees the same problem that Bojorquez does in Texas. Thats for an output that cant be dispatched, and has little capacity value, he pointed out. On the electric grid, wind displaces either coal or natural gas, depending on when the wind is blowing. Under the current pricing structure, utilities would prefer to displace natural gas, because it has a fuel cost of several cents per kilowatt-hour. At peak hours, when utilities are meeting the last few megawatts of demand with natural gas, that is what wind replaces. But the carbon saved would be doubled if it displaced coalalthough that is less preferable for utilities, since coal represents a penny or two per kilowatt-hour for fuel. EPRI projects the price of wind at about $75 per megawatt-hour in 2010 but falling to under $50 per megawatt-hour by 2020. At that price, it would be cheaper than any form of coal with carbon capture, and cheaper than high-efficiency natural gas prices, assuming the price of natural gas stays flat and there is no carbon tax. If there is a carbon tax, winds advantage grows. But heavy reliance on wind requires building transmission lines to where the wind is, which is never easy. Wind might be a better bet for displacing gasoline, suggests Mark S. Duvall, the manger of technology
30%

development at EPRI. The wind does blow when a car is likely to be parked, at night. One much talked about option is the plug-in hybrid, which carries a battery with a useable capacity of 5 kilowatt-hours or so. Automakers say it would run mostly on electricity, calling on the gasoline engine for climbing hills or accelerating down freeway ramps. At 4 miles per kilowatt-hour, 5 kilowatt-hours would mean 20 miles, reducing consumption for the average driver by 1 gallon of gas a day. With a coal-generated kilowatthour producing about 1.9 pounds of carbon dioxide, the output of a car charged by coal would be under half a pound per mile. In contrast, a gallon of gasoline creates about 20 pounds of carbon dioxide, including refining and combustion. So a car that averages 20 miles a gallon in mixed city-highway driving produces about 1 pound of carbon dioxide per mile. Simply switching to the plug-in hybrid implies a sharp cut in carbon dioxide output (not to mention ancillary benefits like cutting dependency on oil). Moving to a wind-based kilowatt-hour implies a much sharper cut. The catch is that the battery does not yet exist. Duvall says it would require a battery that would maintain a charge through 3,000 cycles. As anyone who has owned a laptop computer for a few months can attest, rechargeable batteries hold less and less charge as time goes on. General Motors has showed off a plug-in electric concept car, the Chevy Volt, but is

SOLAR POWER: PHOTOVOLTAIC SYSTEM EFFICIENCY

WIND SPEEDS LOWEST TO HIGHEST CLASS 1 CLASS 2 CLASS 3 CLASS 4 CLASS 5 CLASS 6 25%

As more research dollars have gone to solar power research, system efficiency has improved.

20%

15%

10%

5%

CRYSTALLINE SILICON THIN FILM CONCENTRATOR

0 1995

2000

2005

2010

2015

2020

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SOLAR POWER: PHOTOVOLTAIC COST OF ENERGY (CENTS/KWH)

Increases in photovoltaic efficiency have led to decreases in the cost of solar energy. When photovoltaic cells were first incorporated into consumer products in the mid-twentieth century, they cost as much as $1,500 per watt of capacity. Today, grid-connected photovoltaic systems sell for about $5$10 per watt of capacity, which translates into a cost of about 20 cents per kilowatt-hour.

100

80

60

40

20

0 1980

1990

2000

2010

2020

38

BU LLETI N OF TH E ATOM IC SC IEN TISTS

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SOURCE: SOLAR POWER: PHOTOVOLTAIC COST OF ENERGY/ENERGY DEPARTMENT; PREVIOUS PAGESOURCE: CASE STUDY: WIND POTENTIAL IN TEXAS/PACIFIC NORTHWEST NATIONAL LABORATORY; SOURCE: SOLAR POWER: PHOTOVOLTAIC SYSTEM EFFICIENCY/ENERGY DEPARTMENT

reluctant to bring it to market until it has a battery it can warranty. Solar panels do not kill birds, make noise, or spoil views; they are quiet and unobtrusive. But they are also nearly irrelevant, at least in terms of grid-scale energy. Production is growing by leaps and bounds, but the U.S. governments Energy Information Administration (EIA) recently predicted that by 2030, grid-connected photovoltaic power would still produce just 1 of every 1,000 kilowatthours. 21 This is true even though solar is being force-fed to the electric system. A recent study by Chris Robertson and Jill Cliburn looked at states with renewable portfolio standards, or quotas for renewable energy, and noted that Arizona, Colorado, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and the District of Columbia all specify that part of their energy has to come from solar.22 The reluctance among energy-hungry states to become sun-worshippers comes down to expense: The capital cost of solar is 6 times more than for a new coal plant, and 15 times more than for a gas-generating unit.23 The price could fall, of course. Solar energy units now run around $8 per peak watt for a typical rooftop installation, and perhaps $6 for large-scale jobs, according to Roger Little, chief executive of Spire Corp., a Massachusetts manufacturer. The cells themselves are a silicon material similar to what is used in computer chips, and if not quite amenable to

Moores Law (which predicts a doubling in speed every 18 months), they are at least subject to big improvements. But of the $6, half is for the balance of system, including brackets, cables, and an inverter to turn the direct current into alternating current, says Little. That cost might be harder to beat down. However, Robertson and Cliburn argue that solar can already pay its way if it specializes in the spots where demand is high and the distribution system is strained. In other words, it can shave the peaks for which conventional generation is needed. And the output of solar cells is easier to predict than wind, since the suns angle is known with precision, and cloud cover is already commonly forecast and follows a seasonal pattern. Even on cloudy days, solar cells produce something. There is a less glamorous route for getting energy from the sun, but it is a lot cheaper: solar thermal. Utilities build multi-acre arrays of mirrors, laid out in rows and curved inward, looking like half a sewer pipe. At their focus is a small pipe painted a heat-absorbing black, inside which runs antifreeze or some other working fluid. The mirrors heat the fluid, which either boils directly or gives off its heat to water that is boiled. The steam runs through a turbine as at any other plant. In some variants, the solar array is married to a natural gas plant, adding heat to that process, or taking over when the sun

is right. The technology was demonstrated in the 1980s but languished during a long period of low natural gas prices. Solar thermal installations are on the megawatt scale. But for both solar and wind, even in big installations, there is less than meets the eye, because of the capacity factor. It is a function of two separate problems: How many hours of power are needed, and how many hours the plant can run. Both solar and wind have marginal costs near zero, meaning that once they are built, the additional cost to run them an extra hour is negligible. So the goal is to run them whenever possible; however, that turns out to be not very often. For example, Applied Materials, a California company that makes solar cells, said last March that it was installing 1.9 megawatts of cells on its campus in Sunnyvale. That is a lot of power; a large Wal-Mart consumes about 1 megawatt. But Applied Materials cells will not produce nearly as much electricity as needed by a WalMart. The company said that its cells would produce over 2,330 megawatthours annually. That means a capacity factor of about 14 percent. In contrast, nuclear plants have a capacity factor of about 90 percent, so 1.9 megawatts of nuclear capacity would produce about 15,000 megawatt-hours, more than six times what the same capacity of solar cells would make. The capacity factor for wind is a little trickier to understand. A

SOURCE: RENEWABLE ENERGY INVESTMENT/NEW ENERGY FINANCE; NEXT PAGESOURCE: SOCOLOW/PACALA WEDGE MODEL/SOCOLOW & PACALA

developer who put up a small turbine could run it with a high capacity factor, but for many hours of the year the blades would be letting vast amounts of energy slip away because the machine was not big enough to capture the breeze. Wind developers, like people who build hotels in towns where the number of tourists varies widely over a season, seek a balance between minimizing the initial cost and capturing as much of the available resource as possible. It also depends on how often the wind at a site is above the minimum velocity required to turn the blades. A capacity factor of 30 percent is considered good. Thus, it takes about 3,000 megawatts of wind to make as much energy as a 1,000-megawatt nuclear reactor does. Renewables are not everybodys idea of a sensible route for bulk power production. In fact, a backlash is emerging. Some of it is predictable; for example, Michael J. Mudd, a longtime executive at the coal giant American Electric Power who now heads FutureGen, is ready to dump renewables. Renewables, while important and significant, will never fill the large demand that coal will, he opines. There is simply not enough energy intensity available. Its important, but itll never be the major source of low-carbon electricity for our world. There are warnings from investment analysts as well that a crash may be coming. If investors take a bath, it
Historically relying on oil and coal for energy production, Brazil, India, and China aim to further develop their renewable energy markets. Brazil is building on its large biofuel industry and investing in wind capacity; China is investing in solar thermal and photovoltaic installations; and India hopes to expand its growing wind power industry.
5,000 4,500 4,000 3,500 3,000 2,500 2,000 1,500 1,000 500 0

wont end innovation and progress, but it could certainly slow the process down. Two independent authorities have recently released reports akin to Alan Greenspans famous 1996 irrational exuberance comment that the stock market might be overvalued. Michael Liebreich, chairman and CEO of New Energy Finance, which invests in factories that make biofuels and other kinds of clean energy projects, pointed out at a forum held in New York City in April that global investment in clean energy, including renewables, biofuels, low-carbon technology, and the carbon markets, had grown to $70.9 billion in 2006, more than double the $27.5 billion of 2005. This is a sign of overheating in the market, he warned, with investment becoming frenzied. I cannot think of a venture capitalist who does not believe that he or she is going to make a bundle out of all things sustainable, he said. That sort of group-think is dangerous. It doesnt matter how great the company or the opportunity, if you get in at the wrong valuation you wont make money. Most investors, he said, will end up licking their wounds. Matthew M. Nordan, president of Lux Research, a New York firm that specializes in clean tech, says that the warning signs of a bubble are appearing. Lux cast its net a little wider, to include technologies for making useful energy from waste and to increase end-use efficiency. Its numbers were different but pointed in the same

direction. It found that the amount of venture capital put into such clean energy investments reached $1.5 billion in 2006, up 141 percent from the $623 million of 2005. Capital, he says, was chasing entrepreneurs, instead of the usual situation, in which people with technology ideas have to hunt potential investors.

The dream of environmentalists is a bio-based economy in which the world lives off its farms and forests, converting natural carbohydrates into hydrocarbonsand doing so on the basis of current production, as opposed to fossil fuels, which represent production from eons past. But the first tentative moves in that direction have exposed the difficulties of shifting from living off an inheritance to living on current income. For the late 1980s and the early years of this century, the price of corn was about $2 per bushel. The sudden demand for corn for ethanol pushed the price up into the range of $4 per bushel. This made very little difference to oil demand, since it is so much larger than ethanol demand. (Annual U.S. gasoline consumption is on the order of 140 billion gallons, and ethanol production in 2007 is in the range of 6 billion gallons.) Other uses of renewable materials felt the pinch, notably bioplastics, which are plastics made from plants

RENEWABLE ENERGY INVESTMENT (MILLIONS OF DOLLARS)

BRAZIL INDIA CHINA

2004

2005

2006

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rather than petroleum. Industrial Biotechnology, a trade journal, reported in its spring 2007 issue that the price of feedstocks was up 20 percent in 2006, and that, squeezed by ethanol demand, bioplastics in the long term would have to find some other feedstock. The bioindustry is eating its own lunch, so to speak. All of this could turn around if someone found a practical way to unlock the sugars in cellulose. Cellulose is a form of sugar that is used as building blocks in trees and grasses, but is not digestible by humans, or by the organisms that humans use to turn sugars into alcohol. An organism that could do thator a bioengineered plant that produced easily digestible cellulosewould give the world a source of alcohol fuel with very low inputs of fertilizer and other energy-hungry ingredients, and very low coproduction of carbon dioxide. But for climate, bioenergy cuts both ways. In a climate-constrained world, bioenergy crops could become the largest single crop grown by humans on the planet, said James A. Edmonds, a laboratory fellow at the Joint Global Change Research Institute, in a recent presentation in Washington. Growing those crops could lead to sacrificing the unmanaged ecosystems (which is policy-speak for virgin land) on an unprecedented scale. Deforestation is now a relatively small contributor to human production of global warming gases, he warned, but, We run the
SOCOLOW/PACALA WEDGE MODEL

risk as you expand into the unmanaged ecosystems of accelerating that, and making that the largest source of emissions in the world. There is widespread concern particularly about Brazil, which, along with the United States, is one of the worlds largest producers of biofuel. For years, Brazil subsidized the domestic production of fuel derived from sugar cane (which yields more ethanol per acre and per input of diesel fuel and other energy ingredients), and it now sees itself as a potential major player in the international biofuel market. But environmentalists worry that Brazils aspirations to become a global biofuel sugar daddy will lead to more deforestation of the Amazon, which sequesters nearly 60 billion tons of carbon. Some of what the world needs to slow the buildup of greenhouse gases requires no research or development, and not even any particularly complicated manufacturing. It is energy efficiency, which saves not only the fuel needed to run a power plant, but also the need to develop or expand an energy distribution infrastructure as well. But efficiency does require innovation, mostly in how to conduct a continuous scavenger hunt for where to take simple steps. Take, for example, the refrigerator case in the back of the Georgia Market in Vermont. The market sits behind some Shell gasoline pumps in a cobbled-together building. When Ray Bouffard bought the place in June

2004, he discovered that some of the appliances were venerablethe meat locker dates from the 1930s. And the market, at 7,000 square feet, ran up an electricity bill of $3,000 a month. At the back of the stores rather dim interior sat coffin meat cases, open-topped refrigerators that bled their cold into the room. Bouffard replaced them with a three-level meat case that gave him more display space, along with better lighting for a more attractive presentation. But it also came with four clear plastic covers that snap at the top and bottom, which he lowers like window shades when the store is closed. It is one of the innovations that has allowed him to cut his bill to $2,700 a month, even as he expanded the market. Bouffard is ready for almost any innovation, as long as his up-front cost is low. Weve got a million dollar mortgage here, he says. Ive committed myself to not going back to the bank. The low cost of the changes is stunning. The refrigeration covers, for example, cost about $75 each and more than pay for themselves every year, a rate of return most investors would drool over. A contractor hired by the State of Vermont helped identify the coffin freezers as candidates for retirement, along with the lighting. And the contractor, the Vermont Energy Investment Corporation (VEIC), doing business under the catchier name, Efficiency Vermont, helped

Yes, but will it stop global warming? The wedge model developed by Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala at Princeton University breaks down the impact of various carbon mitigation initiatives. Socolow and Pacala propose a menu of 15 large-scale, global strategies (wedges) to stabilize rising greenhouse gas emissions over the next 50 years. By executing any combination of seven wedges, each representing a reduction of 1 billion tons of carbon per year, we can flatten our upward trajectory, and position ourselves to start reducing the total amount of carbon in the atmosphere. For sample wedges, see p. 41.

TONS OF CARBON EMITTED PER YEAR (IN BILLIONS)

14

CU
7

N RE

YP TL

RO

T EC

ED

TH PA

}
2055

STABILIZATION WEDGES

FLAT PATH

0 1955 HISTORICAL EMISSIONS 2005 2105

40

BU LLETI N OF TH E ATOM IC SC IEN TISTS

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Bouffard install a thermostatically driven damper in the air- handling system that pulls outside air into his walk-in refrigerated beer-and-soda locker when the outdoor temperature is cold enough, which in Vermont is many hours a year. Making use of cold air in Vermont hardly qualifies as brilliant, although it may, in fact, be unusual. To win the energy conservation scavenger hunt, you have to find lots of prizes. Thats why efficiency is such a pain, says Beth Sachs, executive director of VEIC, which is under contract with the state to find thousands of opportunities like these. Dan W. Reicher, who was the deputy secretary of energy for conservation and renewables during the second Clinton administration and is now on the VEIC board of directors, observes that investors would put money into solar power at 25 or 30 cents a kilowatt-hour, but not into conservation at 4 cents, partly because they couldnt find the place to spend the conservation dollars. In fact, it is hard to figure out where to spend the money. At a conference on energy efficiency in New York last April, William Prindle, the deputy director of the American Council for an EnergyEfficient Economy, a Washingtonbased nonprofit organization, said that part of the problem was that it was easier to sign one big contract and write one big check, probably for a new generating station, than to find

a lot of little jobs. He paraphrased Warren Buffett, the legendary investor, explaining why his company, Berkshire-Hathaway, had bought a utility instead of buying numerous power plants. Buffett explained that it was easier to make one $10-billion deal than ten $1-billion deals. But in energy efficiency, said Prindle, its 10 million $1,000 deals. And many of those will require

Back at the Georgia Market, Bouffard knows where he would put the money if he had itreplacing the 1930s freezerbut he doesnt. That, too, is an impediment to a rational energy system. Ralph Cavanagh, an electricity expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council, noted that utility returns average 15 percent, and that the willingness by the utilities to invest

Investors put billions of dollars into solar cells that will make electricity at 2030 cents a kilowatt-hour, but hardly any money into investments that will save electricity at a price of 23 cents per kilowatt-hour. Talk of spending money to save power, rather than make it, gets vague stares on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley.
financing, engineering, and custom installation, he said, making them impossibly cumbersome. The result is an imbalance that economic theory says should not exist. Investors put billions of dollars into solar cells that will make electricity at 2030 cents a kilowatt-hour, says Reicher, but hardly any money into investments that will save electricity at a price of 23 cents per kilowatthour. Talk of spending money to save power, rather than make it, he says, gets vague stares on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley. in relatively low-return generation projects while customers ignore highreturn efficiency investments was driving consumption 2040 percent higher than it should be. We all know theres a lot of economic potential and it makes economic sense to address some of these issues with capital, but its not happening, added Pedro Haas, an energy expert at McKinsey & Company, speaking at the April conference. Worldwide, grid sales of electricity work through a pricing structure that masks the value of driving down demand. Almost everywhere, customers

1
Stop all deforestation. Growing trees consume carbon, making forests a natural sink. But harvesting trees and exposing soil, without replanting, releases stored carbon back into the atmosphere.

2
Replace 2 billion cars running on conventional fuel with cars that run on ethanol. This would require one-sixth of world cropland to be dedicated to growing high-yield energy crops.

3
Displace 700 gigawatts of coal-generated energy with an equal amount of nuclear power, or about 14 new 1,000-megawatt nuclear power plants per year through mid-century.

4
Displace 700 gigawatts of coal-generated energy with 2,000 peak gigawatts of photovoltaic (PV) power. This would require a 60-fold increase in the current annual PV capacity growth rate.

5
Install carbon capture and storage at 800 gigawatts worth of coal-fired plants. Capture is relatively easy; storagein current practice means recycling for use in soft drinks and enhanced oil recovery.

6
Displace 1,400 gigawatts of coal-generated energy with an equal amount of gas-fired power. A million BTU of gas emits about half the carbon dioxide of the same amount of coal.

7
Cut electricity use in homes, offices, and stores by 25 percent. The largest carbon savings are in space heating and cooling, water heating, lighting, and electric appliances.

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pay a price for electricity that represents the average of costs, whether derived through regulation or through a daily auction, as is now common in parts of Europe and the United States. But each kilowatt-hour enters the grid with its own cost, depending on the price of the fuel and the age of the machines used to convert that to power. There is no signal to the buyer, though, that continuing to use an air conditioner that is functional but obsolete adds a sharp increment of cost to the whole system. The kilowatthour saved or consumed at the margin by the individual consumer is priced at the average level, but for the system as a whole, at the peak level. Add to that problem the regulatory confusion for utilities. Those companies already have the expertise to cut demand and have a preexisting relationship with every building owner in their service territories. But in most cases, they earn profits based on sales, so they have little reason to encourage rationality on the customers side of the meter. There is a solution, known among regulators as decoupling, in which utilities earn a profit on money they invested, whether that money is for generation or for demand reduction. In a decoupled system, a utility could spend a few thousand dollars to replace Bouffards 1930s meat locker and get paid a few cents on the dollar every year by all ratepayers, just as the utility could earn a return on a new power plant. But such programs are not intrinsically appealing to the public, or to influential electricity users in the commercial or industrial sectors. Another problem is that, from a greenhouse gas perspective, it is possible to do wrong in energy savings while trying to do good. Reducing energy consumption typically goes handin-hand with reducing the production of global warming gases and conventional pollutants. But not always. The reason is that some of the steps that utilities are beginning to take will cut costs and avoid the need for new plantsbut will have little impact on overall consumption or carbon
42
BU LLETI N OF TH E ATOM IC SC IEN TISTS

emissions. For example, some utilities have lined up customers who are willing to be in interruptible electric contracts, a concept common in the gas industry but not in electricity. It means that in exchange for some financial inducement, like lower rates all year round or a bonus payment every time the curtailment clause is invoked, some customers agree to curtail their load when demand is at a peak; for example, closing up shop and sending workers home on a hot August afternoon when the local utility is straining to meet air-conditioning demand. That method makes electricity customers sensitive to the fact that electricity prices go through huge price swingsa shift from the normal customer deal, which is to pay average prices at all times. But some companies may compensate by shifting their power demand to periods when the system-wide electricity demand is lower. Since on-peak power is made from natural gas in most parts of the United States, and off-peak from coal, one result is to shift to coal, which produces double the carbon per kilowatt-hour that natural gas does. The push for efficiency, and for low-carbon power sources, would surely be stronger with carbon taxes. At this point, though, the prospects are murky, with many industries volunteering for some modest tax, and environmentalists wanting to bide their time, believing that it would be a mistake to let the Bush administration set a fee schedule for the next five or ten years that might turn out not to be ambitious enough. They fear a carbon cap lite approach. Carbon taxes, wherever they are imposed, would go a long way toward cutting emissions. They exist in the European Union in the form of allowances, although that market turned out to be far too volatile to provide a good signal to businesses of how much they should invest in energy efficiency or low-carbon power sources. As yet they do not exist in the United States, partly because for most of Congress, voting for a tax increase is like committing to a revolution. If

the revolution is successful, you are a patriot of the new regime, but if it fails, youve committed treason. Carbon taxes would be a big boost for nuclear over its main competitor, coal. But there is a more basic challenge: World electricity demand will rise in the range of 3050 percent between now and 2030, according to the EIA.24 The history of progress is the history of consumption, and a lot of the world is entering the age of air conditioners, flat-screen televisions, and personal computers. Demand could be moderated by more efficient end-use technology, but demand will still rise. And as demand increases, it tends to make even high-cost generation cost competitive. That suggests that there is a future on the grid for almost everything: coal, natural gas, nuclear power, gasified biomass, and probably solar and wind as well. What remains is to determine the proportions. Solitary events could play a difference; another Chernobyl-scale accident would make nuclear power unsalable in much of the world. A Three Mile Islandscale event, which turns a billion-dollar asset into a billion-dollar liability in a few hours, could do the same. Even accident-free operation could also be a problem, if it is erratic and inefficient, and no one is quite sure how well the new generation of reactors will run. Nuclear power will be used where government policy allows long leadtimes, capital intensive investment, and where natural gas is expensive or coal cannot be used without expensive sequestration. Yet none of these technologies will prosper purely on its merits. Governments will funnel money to research, development, and deployment according to their ideologies and their perceptions of local advantage. Climate change may be global, but not everyone will put it at the top of the priority list. As retired Vice Admiral McGinn said, first you have to recognize mice as a threat.
FOR NOTES, PLEASE SEE P. 63.

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Energy comparison
SOURCE OF ENERGY COST (EST.) 4.8 cents per kilowatt-hour ADVANTAGES
l l l

DISADVANTAGES
l

Coal Coal/carbon capture

Inexpensive Deposits are widely distributed Easier than natural gas to move to power plants Effective way to capture carbon (roughly 90 percent complete) New technologies could lower the cost of capturing a metric ton of CO2 from $40 to $24

Emits 1.9 pounds of carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour

6.57.7 cents per kilowatt-hour

l l

Technologies not fully developed Questions persist regarding legal liability of sequestering carbon in saline aquifers Captured carbon is sometimes used for enhanced oil recovery, but using that oil creates more CO2 Nuclear waste Increases risk of nuclear proliferation Longer construction times due to moribund nuclear manufacturing sector Projected growth is sufficient to make only a modest contribution to cutting carbon emissions Strong winds may not be located near major energy markets Wind doesnt blow during peak demand times Lower capacity factor than nuclear or coal Solar photovoltaic is two to four times the expected cost of coal with carbon capture Lower capacity factor than nuclear or coal

Nuclear

39.6 cents per kilowatt-hour

l l

Does not emit carbon dioxide Efficiency and safety standards have improved considerably since 1970s and 1980s Reactors could coproduce electricity and hydrogen for transportation fuel

l l l

Wind

46 cents per kilowatt-hour

l l

Does not emit carbon dioxide Fuel is free

Solar

1214 cents per kilowatt-hour (solar thermal) 1840 cents per kilowatt-hour (photovoltaic)

l l

Does not emit carbon dioxide Marginal costs to operate are near zero Output is easier to predict than wind

Biofuels

Ethanol from corn sells at the price of gasoline, not including its subsidy. Ethanol from cellulose is not commercially available.

l l

Lower carbon dioxide emissions Emerging technologies promise to lower energy cost and coproduction of carbon dioxide-emitting inputs (fertilizer, etc.)

Demand for ethanol has pushed up corn pricesincreasing the price of food and raising the costs of other bioindustries Clearing of forests to grow biofuel may increase carbon in the atmosphere Investors have trouble finding places to invest in energy efficiency Current market provides no signal to consumers that inefficient energy use increases overall costs Few utilities have incentive to encourage energy efficiency

Energy efficiency

Experts estimate large amounts of savings available at 4 cents per kilowatt-hour or less.

Lower emissions of carbon dioxide without the need for complex R&D or expensive manufacturing No need to build new generators or add to the distribution network

SOURCES: MIT REPORT: THE FUTURE OF COAL: OPTIONS FOR A CARBON CONSTRAINED WORLD; PRESENTATION BY RAY GANTHNER, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT AREVA NP, JUNE 15, 2007, TO THE COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS; U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT; SOLAR ENERGY INDUSTRIES ASSOCIATION; R. NEAL ELLIOTT, INDUSTRIAL PROGRAM DIRECTOR AT THE AMERICAN COUNCIL FOR AN ENERGY EFFICIENT ECONOMY, PRESENTATION AT THE ENERGY EFFICIENCY FINANCE FORUM, APRIL 12, 2007, NEW YORK, NY.

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GETTING POWER TO THE PEOPLE

Continued from p. 42 1. Robert Socolow, presentation to the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced Institutional Studies, April 20, 2007. 2. Christopher G. Pernin, Mark A. Bernstein, Andrea Mejia, Howard Shih, Fred Reuter, and Wilbur Steger, Generating Electric Power in the Pacific Northwest: Implications of Alternative Technologies (Santa Monica: Rand Corporation, 2002). 3. Potential Effects of Climate Change on Electric Utilities, Electric Power Research Institute, 1995. 4. Victor Niemeyer, Climate Science Needs for Long-term Power Generation, Electric Power Research Institute, Presentation, 2005, www.climatescience.gov/workshop2005/presentations/EN2.1_Niemeyer.pdf. 5. New Impetus for Climate Policy: Making the Most of Germanys Dual Presidency, Germany Advisory Council on Climate Change, Policy Paper 5, 2007. 6. CIA World Factbook, https://www.cia .gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/ geos/xx.html#Econ. 7. The Future of Coal: Options for a CarbonConstrained World, MIT, March 2007. 8. See Overview of Cryogenic Air Separation and Liquefier Systems, on the website of Universal Industrial Gases, Inc., www.uigi .com/cryodist.html. 9. The Future of Coal, March 2007. 10. Reuel Shinnar, The Hydrogen Economy, Fuel Cells, and Hydrogen Fueled Cars: A Technical Evaluation, City College of New York, March 13, 2002. 11. 2006 U.S. Industry Performance Indicators, Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), 2006, www.nei.org/documents/WANO_ performance_indicators_2006.pdf. 12. Safety of Nuclear Power Reactors, World Nuclear Association, January 2007, www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf06.html. 13. Ann S. Biconti for the NEI, Perspective on Public Opinion: Public Supports Climate Change Action, But is Unclear on Nuclear Energys Role in Preventing Greenhouse Gases, May 2007, www.nei.org/documents/ PublicOpinion_May2007.pdf. 14. Marvin Fertel, NEI senior vice president, testimony before the Senate Energy Committee, 109th Cong., 1st sess., February 3, 2005. 15. Olkiluoto 3 Progress Update, AREVA press release, July 12, 2006. 16. The Economics of Nuclear Power, Greenpeace USA, May 1, 2007, www.greenpeace.org/usa/press/reports/theeconomics-of-nuclear-power. 17. Keith McCoy, NAM Comprehensive Legislative Proposal: Energy Security for American Competitiveness, National Association of Manufacturers, February 2007. 18. Nuclear Energy Industry Poised for Growth Based on Excellent Performance of Todays Plants, NEI press release, February 2, 2006. 19. Robert Alvarez, Radioactive Wastes and The Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, Institute for Policy Studies, April 2007. 20. Environmental Impacts of Wind Energy Projects, Committee on Environmental

Impacts of Wind Energy Projects, National Research Council, 2007. 21. Annual Energy Outlook, Energy Information Administration (EIA), 2007. 22. Chris Robertson and Jill K. Cliburn, Utility-Driven Solar Energy as a Least-Cost Strategy to Meet RPS Policy Goals and Open New Markets, ElectricSUN, American Solar Energy Society, 2006, www.solar2006.org/ presentations/forums/f19-robertson.pdf. 23. Granger Morgan, Jay Apt, and Lester Lave, U.S. Electric Power Sector and Climate Change Mitigation, Pew Center on Global Climate Change, June 2005. 24. Annual Energy Outlook, EIA.

NUCLEAR NOTEBOOK
Continued from p. 62 1. National Nuclear Security Administration, Energy Department, Dismantlements of Nuclear Weapons Jump 50 Percent, Press Release, June 7, 2007. 2. Ibid. 3. House Armed Services Committee (HASC), National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008 to Accompany H.R. 1585, Report 110-146, 110th Cong., 1st sess., May 11, 2007, p. 539 (Section 3113). 4. R. J. Hemley et al., Pit Lifetime, Jason Report, JSR-06-335, January 11, 2007, p. 19, www.fas.org/irp/agency/dod/jason/pit.pdf. 5. For further analysis see Hans M. Kristensen, The 20042008 Stockpile Stewardship Plan, Nuclear Information Project, www.nukestrat.com/US/ssp04-08.htm. 6. For a discussion of the Reliable Replacement Warhead, see July/August 2007 Bulletin, pp. 3049; Nuclear Weapons Complex Assessment Committee, The United States Nuclear Weapons Program: The Role of the Reliable Replacement Warhead (Washington, D.C.: AAAS, 2007); Jonathan Medalia, The Reliable Replacement Warhead Program: Background and Current Developments, Congressional Research Service Issue Brief RL 32929, May 11, 2007. 7. Senate Armed Services Committee, National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008, Report 110-77, 110th Cong., 1st sess., June 5, 2007, p. 395 (Section 1061). 8. HASC, Report 110-146, p. 390 (Section 1046).

ARAB NUCLEAR ENVY

Continued from p. 49 1. GCC Calls on Tehran to Enforce Stability, Security in Gulf Region, Arab Times, November 28, 2005. 2. Amanda Lee Myers, Saudi Ambassador Decries Iran Nuke Program, Associated Press, February 8, 2006. 3. Mousa yutalib al-arab bil-istikhdam as-silmi lil-taqa al-nawawiya [Mousa Asks Arabs to Pursue Peaceful Nuclear Energy], AlIttihad, March 29, 2006. 4. Egypt: The Muslim Brotherhood Does Not Oppose Iran Obtaining Nuclear Weapons, As-Sharq Al-Awsat, April 17, 2006. 5. Do You Believe That the Iranian Nuclear Program Is in the Best Interest of the Region? Al-Jazeera poll, April 16, 2006; Mohammed Abdel Salam, The Arab Position on Iranian Nuclear Activities, Al-Ahram, September 9, 2004. 6. Darss irani lizu`amaa al Arab [An Iranian Lesson to Arab Leaders], Al-Quds Al-Arabi, June 1, 2006. 7. Salamah Ahmad Salamah, Egyptian Columnist Urges Different Position on Irans Nuclear Program, Al-Ahram Weekly, July 27, 2006, OSC document GMP20060730362006. 8. Al dhilal al-`Iraniya wal harb `ala Hizb Allah, [Irans Shadow and the War on Hezbollah], Al-Jazeera, August 14, 2006. 9. Egyptian Presidents Son Proposes Developing Nuclear Energy, Associated Press, September 19, 2006. 10. Saudi Arabia, Libya Promise to Provide Uranium to Egypts Nuclear Programme, Al-Misriyun, November 6, 2006. 11. Abdullah Shihri and Diana Elias, Gulf States Study Nuclear Options, Toronto Star, December 11, 2006. 12. Hassan M. Fattah, Arab Nations Plan to Start Joint Nuclear Energy Program, New York Times, December 11, 2006; Emily B. Landau, The Risky Reality of New Nuclear Programs, Jerusalem Post, December 12, 2006; Roula Khalaf, Gulf Arabs Weigh Joint Nuclear Programme, Financial Times, December 11, 2006. 13. Morocco to Invest in Nuclear Power for the First Time, Agence France-Presse April 25, 2006; John Thorne, Putin in Morocco for Talks Likely on Arms, Nuclear Reactor, Associated Press, September 7, 2006. 14. Energy Information Administration, Country Analysis Briefs, Arab Maghreb Union, February 2004 (www.eia.doe.gov/ emeu/cabs/morocco.html/). 15. Egypts Energy Minister on Nuclear Dream, Al-Ahram, October 6, 2006.

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