Irrational cuts proposed to DOE

The Heritage Foundation just released a report providing opportunity and rationalization for $6 billion in cuts to the Department of Energy (H/T Teryn Norris). Here's the abstract of the report, titled "Department of Energy Spending Cuts: A Guide to Trimming President Obama’s 2012 Budget Request."

Government spending has been spiraling upward in nearly all areas—and spending by most government agencies can, and should, be cut. President Obama recently submitted his 2012 budget request to Congress, providing fertile ground for spending cuts. One of the fastest-growing federal agencies, the Department of Energy (DOE), with its numerous research, development, and grant programs, offers many opportunities for savings. While there is an important role for DOE in energy security and environmental management, many DOE projects fall outside its mission, supporting everything from commercialization of technologies to non-critical research—which can be conducted, usually much more efficiently, by the private sector.

Three things.

One, and I'm sure there are plenty at the Heritage Foundation who would agree with me on this, but cutting $6 billion from the federal budget will have approximately zero effect on "Alleviating the huge debt burden that the government is placing on future generations," as the report calls for. When someone calls for deficit reduction without addressing Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and/or revenue increases, I instinctively ignore them. I realize these are program-specific cut recommendations, but the idea that cutting back on investing in our future will relieve the burden of our irresponsibility from future generations is more than a tad suspect to me.

Two, the report claims that "Energy production is a viable commercial enterprise, so the U.S. does not need a government agency dedicated to advancing this activity." This is simply incorrect. Few to no commercial scale energy production technologies would benefit from economies of scale and distribution without implicit and explicit government support. Coal and oil receive tens of billions of federal dollars in subsidies annually, and the continued deployment of energy production technology depends also on government insurance and liability policies, since material extraction, energy production and transmission are such high-risk enterprises. As Mark Hertsgaard reports in his account* of the 1950s budding nuclear power industry, "the industry ... preferred an arrangement whereby the government would help cover the costs of commercialization but still allow the corporations to control and profit from it."

Three, the report is founded upon the unsupported assertion that the private sector is the more effective laboratory for energy technologies. "Many government programs included in Presidents’ annual DOE budgets evolved from basic research and development to attempts at commercialization better left to the private sector." The report continues by questioning need for government funding or operations in R&D. On the contrary, publicly-funded research and development are essential factors in the advancement of energy technology. There are two key reasons for this. One is the so-called "Valley of Death" in technological development that exists between the basic research stage and the commercialization stage, in which risk, uncertainty and deployment challenges combine to dissuade private capital from advancing project. The second reason is the spillover effect; private enterprise will be less likely to finance energy technology R&D since they will be ultimately unable to capture the full benefits of production.

We obviously, but maybe not imminently, need to have a serious national discussion about the debt/deficit problems. But targeting relatively small federal programs, particularly ones like DOE technology innovation programs with a clear national mission and a big bang for their buck, is not the right way to go about it.
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*Nuclear Inc.:The Men and Money Behind Nuclear Power by Mark Hertsgaard. 1983. pp. 33.

Energetics Cliff Notes - Wednesday Edition

All your riveting climate/energy news in one convenient place.

• Greentech Media recaps this weekend's Berkeley-Stanford Cleantech Conference, featuring keynote speaker Steven Chu (see my Twitter timeline for overly detailed liveblogging).
  

• Chu stuck around after the weekend to attend a bill signing by Jerry Brown at a SunPower manufacturing plant in Milpitas. The legislation will require California utilities to get 33% of their power (an increase from 20%) from alternative energy technologies by 2020.

• Bill Weihl, Google's green energy czar and a founder of google.org's fan-favorite Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal, on a prototype mirror design that could cut the cost of large solar thermal plants in half.

• Grist's Dave Roberts explains why environmentalists blocking CARB's implementation of AB 32 (featuring California's cap-and-trade program) are a little misguided.

• This (long-ish) post by Barry Brook is one of the best reactions pieces I've seen to the Fukushima nuclear accident.
  

• Big cuts are expected as the latest CR to fund the government unfolds -- high-speed rail is just one of the many unfortunate choices taking hits.
  

Energetics Cliff Notes - Tuesday Edition

• Amid a still-ongoing nuclear accident and buoyant oil prices, The Hill reports that President Obama will "outline a plan for America's energy future" tomorrow (Wednesday). The focus is expected to be on transportation and clean vehicles.

• Gov. Tim Pawlenty thinks his rationalization for flip-flopping on cap-and-trade is better than his rivals' in the race for the 2012 Republican nomination. Sure. Okay.

• An interesting piece at TechCrunch on how high finance is stealing human capital from research, engineering, and entrepreneurialism. "Let’s save the world by keeping our engineers out of finance. We need them to, instead, develop new types of medical devices, renewable energy sources, and ways for sustaining the environment and purifying water, and to start companies that help America keep its innovative edge."

• Andrew Revkin laments the hyperbole and fear-mongering that go hand-in-hand with the media's reporting on Fukushima.

• Florida's rejection of $1.2 billion in high-speed rail funds may be good news for the Merced leg of California's planned HSR route (via California High Speed Rail Blog -- follow it!).

• The German Green Party is taking over the state of Baden-Württemberg, ending a 58-year control by the Christian Democratic Union party. Roger Pielke Jr. wonders what will replace nuclear power in the state, which currently supplies "about half of its electricity" and which the Greens are expected to get rid of. (Answer? Coal. Woohoo.)

• Americans for Energy Leadership provides an update on the state of the US solar industry. "Though the data can be analyzed and interpreted from numerous angles, overall the industry appeared to grow and expand substantially in 2009."

• Jesse Jenkins of the Breakthrough Institute was on NPR's Weekend Edition on Sunday, explaining that the incident at Fukushima will not likely alter the future for nukes in the US. Basically, we weren't exactly planning on building a lot of new reactors before, and the events in Japan aren't going to change that one way or the other.

• Christine Hertzog on the asymmetric information problem between utilities and consumers RE smart meters. "People need to know the true financial and economic costs of power outages, and how different Smart Grid technologies reduce overall outage time and increase reliability metrics. In other words, what are the risks of not implementing these solutions."

Quote of the Day

Dan Kammen of the World Bank and UC Berkeley (and who taught me ER100 at Cal) has a nice, quick piece up in The Atlantic today on small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs). His analysis indicates that SMRs present multiple advantages that overcome some or many of the challenges typically presented by nuclear power, but that any forward momentum of a "nuclear renaissance" may have been irreparably slowed by the incident in Fukushima.

At this point the nuclear industry faces a range of issues; resilience of backup systems; waste management; cost; and public trust. While SMRs offer potentially attractive approaches to a number of design issues, many of the most pressing issues facing the nuclear industry today are not technological.

Nuclear Reaction Roundup: Experts Warn Against Dismissing Nuclear Power

Originally published at Americans for Energy Leadership.

In the midst of the ongoing partial meltdown at Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant, energy experts across the spectrum are urging caution and patience in considering the implications for nuclear energy in the United States and internationally. In particular, many energy and climate change experts note that we should not so readily dismiss nuclear power as an option for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and meeting rising global energy demand.

International Energy Agency chief Nobuo Tanaka:

"While I understand the public's fear, I am concerned given the important role of nuclear power. I encourage patience until more information is gathered for a full review so we can learn the lessons," he added... "The cost of fighting against global warming will increase, that is sure," he told Reuters. "I think it is very difficult (to fight global warming), even impossible, without using nuclear power."

Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC):

Nuclear power plants built in the areas usually thought of as earthquake zones, such as the California coastline, have a surprisingly low risk of damage from those earthquakes. Why? They built anticipating a major quake... The NRC, the federal agency responsible for nuclear power safety, says the odds are in the public's favor. "Operating nuclear power plants are safe," the NRC said when it reported the new risk estimates.

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA):

Robert Engel, former IAEA inspector and Swiss nuclear engineer, told Reuters Sunday that a partial meltdown of a reactor “is not a disaster” and that he doubted a complete meltdown is possible. And the details of the current Japanese reactor crisis bear little similarity to the Soviet-era meltdown at Chernobyl, which came about through design flaws and human error before it spread a radioactive cloud across much of Europe and Asia 25 years ago.

Experts at the IAEA “aren’t planning for the next Chernobyl” says a mid-level Western diplomat familiar with how the organization works. “But nor do [they] think we are out of the woods yet. The reactors are still hot. But this situation has no relation to Chernobyl, even though I realize that in the popular lore, if you say ‘Chernobyl,’ it means 'catastrophic meltdown.'”

United States Secretary of Energy Steven Chu:

“The president and the administration believe we have to be looking very, very closely at the events in Japan. We have to apply whatever lessons that can be and will be learned from what has happened and what is happening in Japan,” Chu explained. “Those lessons would then be applied to first look at our current existing fleet of reactors, to make sure that they can be used safely and… how as one proceeds forward, any lessons learned can be applied.”

Jason Grumet of the Bipartisan Policy Center (and former Obama energy advisor):

“It’s not possible to achieve a climate solution based on existing technology without a significant reliance on nuclear power,” said Jason Grumet, president of the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington and an energy and climate change adviser to the 2008 Obama campaign. “It’s early to reach many conclusions about what happened in Japan and the relevance of what happened to the United States. But the safety of nuclear power will certainly be high on the list of questions for the next several months.”

Joshua Freed of Third Way:

One shouldn’t minimize the dangers faced by the workers, but even something as catastrophic as the disaster in Japan might turn out to be a lot less catastrophic in terms of damage and loss of life than we fear right now. And you have to weigh that against the health, environmental impact and assorted other costs of the fossil fuels we rely on every day. And if, like most people, you think climate change is happening and poses a massive threat, you have to ask what options we have.

How Japan Should Impact the US Nuclear Debate

My thoughts and prayers have been and will continue to be with the people of Japan. Their suffering is both a tragedy and testimony to the fragility of even the most developed infrastructure.

It is also a reminder of the sometimes alarming ubiquity of our energy supply system. Almost a year after the Deepwater oil spill began in the Gulf of Mexico, the people of Japan and around the world are watching as another potential oversized disaster unfolds due to a crack in the global energy pipeline. The Daiichi reactor in Fukushima, Japan suffered structural damage as a result of the 8.9 point earthquake on Friday, and three explosions caused by excessive sea water flooding have only made the situation worse. Perhaps because of our energy infrastructure’s ubiquity, disasters like these are bound to happen, but nuclear accidents are the ones that seem to rattle public confidence most profoundly. It is important to understand such disasters in the proper context in order to learn from mistakes and not unduly handicap any options in the critical quest for cleaner energy.

Fortunately, speaking in disaster orders of magnitude, the still unresolved emergency at the Daiichi facilities will most likely resemble a Three Mile Island as opposed to a Chernobyl. Engineers on the ground appear confident, and James F. Stubbins of the University of Illinois says “the likelihood there will be a huge fire like at Chernobyl or a major environmental release like at Chernobyl, I think that’s basically impossible.”reported over the weekend in NYT:

Until this weekend, President Obama, mainstream environmental groups and large numbers of Republicans and Democrats in Congress agreed that nuclear power offered a steady energy source and part of the solution to climate change, even as they disagreed on virtually every other aspect of energy policy. Mr. Obama is seeking tens of billions of dollars in government insurance for new nuclear construction, and the nuclear industry in the United States, all but paralyzed for decades after the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, was poised for a comeback.

Nuclear power’s comeback may have hit a speed bump, or at least picked up a few skeptical passengers. Nevertheless, as Broder points out, the Administration is following through on its commitment to nuclear in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, and regulators at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission claim that America’s nuclear power plants will be safe in natural disasters. That very well may be the case, but the safety of our existing fleet of 104 reactors hasn’t precipitated the construction of a single new plant since 1979, when the victimless accident at Three Mile Island put the American nuclear industry in stasis.

With public health and safety concerns certainly piqued by events in Japan, political and financial obstacles to a nuclear renaissance may have sharpened as well. As I opined recently, nuclear power may actually be one of the most popular forms of energy considered by Congress in recent years, and certainly the most popular form capable of generating baseload power. The effects of the Japanese disaster on American politics are yet to be seen, but don’t expect them to be zero.

Additionally, the private sector has long bemoaned the extreme regulatory hurdles and capital costs associated with breaking new ground on a nuclear site, and any legislation seeking to erect new power plants was likely to both standardize structural facility design and streamline the permitting process. But whereas a week ago the prospect of a cheaper, quicker process for installing new nuclear power seemed welcome, now it may seem to many like rushing into things. Even if Congress follows through on its fairly widespread support for nuclear power, the myriad of concerns raised vividly by the Daiichi accident may weigh heavily on the minds of our legislators.

The dangers exposed by this debate extend even farther when we consider the big picture. Say we somehow agree to some threshold of n disasters divided by total nuclear capacity as an acceptable future. Even if n ≤ 0, we would still have to weigh that calculation against the arguably much more dangerous carbon infrastructure that nuclear power would replace. As Americans for Energy Leadership has written, the environmental, health/safety, and geopolitical consequences of the carbon economy are vast. And though the casualty count for coal and oil accidents is much higher than for nuclear, again, the nuclear catastrophes really seem to stick in our collective psyche.

Basis: per million MWe operating for one year, not including plant construction, based on historic data which is unlikely to represent current safety levels in any of the industries concerned. | Sources: Ball, Roberts & Simpson, 1994; Hirschberg et al, Paul Scherrer Institut 1996, in: IAEA 1997; Paul Scherrer Institut, 2001.

However, any form of decarbonization of our energy economy in the near future is unlikely without substantial help from the “nuclear wedge”, says Broder:

“’It’s not possible to achieve a climate solution based on existing technology without a significant reliance on nuclear power,’ said Jason Grumet, president of the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington and an energy and climate change adviser to the 2008 Obama campaign.”

The danger in this case, then, is what will happen if we don’t expand our nuclear capacity.

We should not be alarmists. The maintenance of, and revolution in, our energy infrastructure will not occur by comparing death tolls. But in the aftermath of events like the disaster at Fukushima, it is difficult not to suffer a little sobriety at the prospect of moving in any direction on energy. We are frightened by the possibility of a meltdown, just as we face the daunting task of decarbonization. However, to be rather mechanistic, the direct casualties resulting from any nuclear contamination or explosion should not be tallied independently from other injuries resulting from this natural disaster. We need to be careful not to blame nuclear technology for damage done by a tsunami, just as we would not blame an architect if an unusually strong earthquake destroyed a house (as this one did many).

This is neither an “accidents happen” moment, nor a time to point fingers. And we do not dishonor a tragedy or exercise hubris by compelling forward reasons for optimism in the arena of nuclear energy debate. As AEL’s Dan O’Connor recently pointed out, nuclear power carries with it the benefits of base load power generation and capacity factors exceeding 90%, the highest in the business. The impressive contribution of nuclear power has shrunk the carbon intensity (in this case, carbon intensity = kgCO₂/MWh) in economies like France, Sweden and, yes, Japan (see Table 1 – credit to CARMA).

Table 1. CO₂ emissions from electricity generation

Country	Electricity generated(a)	CO2emissions (b)	Energy mix (c)			Carbon intensity(d)
	TWeh	million tons	fossil	hydro	nuclear	kg CO2/MWeh
Poland	163	163	96%	1%	0%	1002
South Africa	215	198	93%	0%	6%	920
Australia	228	203	90%	7%	0%	891
China	3260	2830	83%	15%	2%	868
India	719	579	76%	16%	2%	805
Czech Republic	78	58	65%	3%	30%	742
Indonesia	125	83	78%	9%	0%	662
Malaysia	95	59	86%	6%	0%	626
Germany	636	389	62%	3%	24%	612
United States	4190	2558	69%	7%	18%	611
Turkey	149	91	72%	27%	0%	609
Taiwan (China)	218	124	59%	4%	17%	570
Thailand	124	70	92%	5%	0%	563
United Kingdom	370	206	71%	1%	20%	557
Netherlands	101	55	78%	0%	4%	548
Spain	283	138	58%	7%	19%	487
Russia	896	434	63%	20%	16%	484
South Korea	392	174	44%	1%	35%	444
Italy	355	152	70%	9%	0%	429
Mexico	220	93	73%	13%	5%	421
Ukraine	172	67	44%	7%	48%	387
Saudi Arabia	167	64	99%	0%	0%	385
Egypt	101	38	87%	12%	0%	376
Japan	1030	376	33%	8%	28%	365
Iran	205	74	86%	10%	0%	363
Belgium	83	26	36%	0%	55%	317
Argentina	95	29	61%	30%	7%	307
Finland (e)	98	29	8%	4%	7%	295
Pakistan	87	23	53%	35%	3%	261
Canada	732	156	26%	50%	12%	213
Venezuela	101	11	24%	74%	0%	110
France	551	48	9%	9%	78%	88
Brazil	431	22	7%	83%	2%	50
Sweden	154	3	2%	47%	45%	17
Norway	139	1	1%	98%	0%	5
World Total	18830	10377	-	-	-	551
The data are taken from the CARMA database. The data are for the year 2007. The table shows the 35 countries with the highest electricity production in 2007. These 35 countries accounted for 90.1% of world electrical energy generation, and 92.7% of world CO2 emissions from electricity generation in 2007. The table is sorted in order of decreasing carbon intensity. The largest value in each column is highlighted. The emissions data are for electricity generation alone. The energy mix data are for electricity generation alone, not for total energy use. The data show emissions during operation, not for the whole life cycle of the generating plant. Notes: (a) The units of electrical energy generated are terawatt-hours. (b) The units of carbon dioxide emissions are millions of metric tons. (c) The fossil fuel fraction in the energy mix combines gas, oil, coal and lignite use. (d) The units of carbon intensity are kilograms of CO2 emitted per megawatt-hour of electricity generated. (e) The data for Finland differ from Finnish industry data. The discrepancy is marked in the table.

The benefits of nuclear power are surely non-negligible, perhaps even wholly impressive, and certainly so for those whose goal is to get us off coal and oil. We should not seek to admonish caution, but the questions raised by accidents do not void the answers given by successes. Therefore, as we undergo a transformation in our energy infrastructure, we must simultaneously take precautions for safety while vigorously exploring new opportunities for decarbonization.