When the budget fight got underway earlier this year, Democrats hammered Republicans for criticizing President Obama's blueprint without a plan of their own. Now, as House Democrats work on cap-and-trade legislation to reform greenhouse gas emissions--one of Obama's main domestic priorities, along with health care and education--House Republicans have crafted an energy plan of their own before the debate has hit full swing.
House Republicans unveiled their energy plan yesterday. It includes offshore drilling leases, 100 new nuclear reactors in the next 20 years (and an extended look at the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository), more Arctic drilling, and a $500 million prize for the first U.S. automaker to sell 50,000 cars that get 100 miles per gallon. Other prizes are included as well, administered by an energy trust fund.
If that sounds familiar, it's because it's a play from John McCain's book: a little over a year ago, McCain pledged
a $300 million prize to anyone who could develop a next-generation
battery to run cars. The plan sounds McCain-influenced on numerous
fronts; nuclear energy was a big part of McCain's energy platform--avid
support for nuclear energy was one distinguishing factor between him
and Obama--and the GOP's new plan bears the "all of the above" mantra
that McCain advocated during the campaign.
...and a $500 million prize for the first U.S. automaker to sell 50,000 cars that get 100 miles per gallon.
This "prize" concept always struck me as weird. Odds are, the first person who's able to successfully produce and sell a 100 mpg car will end up rolling in dough, prize or no prize. That money would be better spent as research grants.
That said, props to the GOP for finally coming up with an alternative proposal for something.
If we have a national mandate to replace coal generation with natural gas and nuclear energy, and replace our commuter cars with electric cars, we can drastically reduce our dependence on foreign oil and also reduce CO2 emissions. See my website www.energyplanusa.com for common sense energy discussion and links to in-depth articles. Cap and trade is too complicated, will enrich a new class of financial traders and cost American consumers billions/trillions.
Rmoen, how does replacing coal effect our dependance on foreign oil? And how does shifting from Coal to natural gas reduce our CO2 emissions? Point being, it doesn't. About the only thing that makes any sense is (scientifically) is geothermal heat being used to move steam driven generators.
Nuclear has waste...and is radioactive for quite a long time...and no matter where it is stored, it only takes one hijacker to get to it to cause a national security problem. And you have to get the radioactive material from somewhere...there is only so much of it in this world.
Natural gas is less abundant than coal, unless you want to use methane produced at the various waste treatment facilities...but that still has CO2.
Coal is abundant but will eventually run out...and needs to be processed a lot, as there is a lot of sulfur in the coal.
Solar does not work 24 hrs a day and takes a lot of room. It also doesn't work well with snow, ice, and any other weather found in the midwest (like rain water leaving dirt spots on the glass.)
Wind generation also does not work 24 hrs a day and takes up a lot of room as well. You get very small output from each generator. It doesn't work in icy conditions too well.
Geothermal can be built...has been used for over 100 yrs and does not (and this is really what the republicans want) make electricity into a commodity. With all the other types of generation, there is an input that has a cost... and shut down needs for maintenence and refueling. Geothermal does not have that. As a steam generator getting heat from the earth's core, the biggest expense will be building it...below the surface of the earth by probably 30-50 ft...which the room building has been done for every high rise in LA, Chicago and New York. You can use an indirect method so as not to lose any "water" and even create a liquid with a lower steaming point than water. No metered input means lower generation cost. Of course this also means that we won't need to start wars over the input (like we would with nuclear, coal or natural gas)
Cgallway, you've got a point on Rmoen that replacing coal won't help our dependence on foreign oil.
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However, nuclear waste is currently a problem worsened by the laws of man (in the US anyway) instead of the laws of physics. Most of the really long-lived waste isotopes from US reactors, the isotopes that make the waste dangerous for 80,000 years, is perfectly good fuel isotopes that could be recovered by recycling the fuel. The dregs left over would fall to the radioactivity of their natural ores in 300 years. The barrier between us and fuel recycling? An executive order from Jimmy Carter. I'd much prefer a small volume of easily guarded radioactive waste that's only a real risk for about 25 years over the carbon dioxide bellowing from a natural gas plant's chimneys.
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There has been other nuclear concepts, like the Integral Fast Reactor, that would've been able to quickly destroy long-lived radioactive wastes during normal operation but, go figure, Green-leaning politicians killed it. They were afraid that a power plant designed in every way to destroy radioactive waste or keep it on its grounds would be a nuclear proliferation risk. The joke's on the green crowd because every nuclear-armed nation got their nukes by building their own reactors, not stealing nuclear waste and now we're stuck (thanks to anti-nuclear groups) with radioactive waste that will have to be watched for 80,000 years because we don't have IFR-style reactors.
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And since we can't recycle fuel or operate IFRs, you'd think we could at least build some place really safe to store the radioactive waste we're stuck with for the next 80,000 years but, nope, Yucca Mountain is under fire, too. We'll be stuck with piles of radioactive waste in power plants' cooling pools - giant swimming pools - near our cities rather than under a mountain.
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We could be answering the US's growing energy demands with nuclear power that eliminated its impact in the environment in (for most intents and purposes) in 25 years (300 years with a big safety margin) rather blowing more CO2 into the air from natural gas and biomass. Heck, we could start reducing our existing greenhouse gas emissions by replacing coal and natural gas plants with nukes but, no, we're stuck wallowing in the nuclear and greenhouse gas nightmare anti-nuclear groups have given us.
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Regarding electric cars, the instantaneous power demand for 100 million cars at normal loads (30-50kW average) would be about 5 gigawatts for the whole nation. That's a tiny percentage increase over the US's current grid capacity of, as I recall, about 1300 gigawatts. If you recharged primarily at home, the grid wouldn't need a lot of modification to handle that load.
Cgallway-
Actually natural gas releases only about 40% of the carbon as does coal. Since coal generation provides about half of US's electricity, if they were replaced by cleaner burning natural gas and carbon-free nuclear, we'd make a huge headway into reducing CO2 emissions. By the way the production of domestic natural gas is increasing by about 10% a year due to new drilling techniques.
Something like half our driving as a nation is for commuting to work, so if we replaced our commute cars with battery powered electric cars, CO2 emissions and our dependence on foreign oil would be reduced substantially.
Please take a look at my website www.energyplanusa.com for in-depth articles.
As far as electric cars...dumb idea. Do you realize the amount of energy that would have to go into creating a grid that covers every single road, parking lot, garage, and the amount of electrical load at each one? Not to mention the voltage drop at the end of the line? You can't just turn the generators on and off, which means a lot of the time you would be producing electricity that would end up going back to ground, unused. Of course, with the multitude of geothermal systems described above, it wouldn't be as big of a deal.
But I digress...the biggest issues with cars is getting off of the foreign oil. To do this, perhaps electical is the best way...or the natural gas/methane.
Personally, I think the best idea is to use what we have. Every waste treatment facility has solid and gaseous waste. Burn them...the gaseous waste is burned anyway...might as well make use out of it. Use the heat to heat up steam generators...so you have 4 generators instead of 2...one fecal burning (like coal) one methane burning (like natural gas) and each one of those has a steam generator getting its heat from their output.
Also, utilize the emissions instead of sticking them in the air. CO2 is used in any carbonated beverage...and there are companies that simply create CO2 for that purpose...have them buy the waste product. Water vapor can be condensed and returned to the soil, or bottled for whatever reason.
cgallaway -
I can tell you're not an engineer (or I hope not, anyway), and you would see the errors in your logic if you were a bit more disciplined.
Though CO2 is not what we want to breathe, it is not a contaminant - it is a natural substance that helps vegetation grow. Separation of CO2 from other combustion products for use in carbonated beverages is the funniest thing I've ever heard of, though, and I thank you for the laugh. You did not understand rmoen's argument about electric cars, but his point is well made. Your handle should be "Mr. Magoo".
You should probably cut to the punch line and say that this energy plan doesn't do anything to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; this energy plan doesn't agree that emissions are enough of a problem to deal with (either because they don't believe it'll cause global warming or because they don't care). Even this pie-in-the-sky stuff won't be enough to stop emissions from growing.
On top of that, it's literally impossible to build and commission 100 new nuclear plants in 20 years. And even if it were possible, a single plant produces, at maximum capacity, less than 1/1000 of the American electricity production in 2002. So 100 plants gets us to less than 10% of electricity production; and current and future electricity demand is well beyond that in 2002 (especially if we're interested in electric cars and all that).
There's also the problem that many currently operable plants are reaching the end of their lifecycles and have to be replaced; quite a few of these 100 plants wouldn't be adding any generating capacity at all.
It would be nice if there were still a high-profile physicist in the country like Feynman who commanded enough respect at the national level to call this for the utter bull that it is.
Alchemy, you really need to get your facts straight. Roughly 20% of the US electrical production is by 104 nuclear plants. Another hundred plants will double nuclear capacity. Coal produces 50%, hydro 7%, natural gas and oil 21%, and all others are at 3%.
As for replacing coal with natural gas, that would absolutely reduce our carbon footprint. Natural gas is primarily methane, CH4. When you burn two molecules of methane, you end up with two molecules of CO2, and four molecules of H2O. Coal is nearly pure carbon. When it burns, you get pretty much nothing other than CO2. Natural gas is the "greenest" hydrocarbon fuel.
I agree on natural gas; it's also important to be selective when closing coal plants.
You're right that I'm off by a factor of 2 judging by the most recent (2007) energy flow document I can find. The average peak capacity per plant is 1 GW (figure 9.2 in link below) and if you multiply that out over a year for 104 plants you only get a bit over 3 exajoules generated instead of the 8 in the energy flow diagram. No clue how to reconcile those numbers, but point taken.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/aer/pdf/aer.pdf
I am a huge supporter of nuclear power, but it's important to recognize that it won't fix the emissions problem (factor of 2 or not). Republicans are presenting a false choice between an "energy tax" (a fair enough way to term cap-and-trade as far as I care) and more nuclear plants; they don't accomplish the same thing.
Agree totally with the nuclear plan. The only technology that exists today that can replace coal/gas is nuclear. Renewables share will increase but there will be serious quality of life reductions for most of the population if we try to move past 10-15%. For every gigawatt of solar/wind we must have a gigawatt of coal/gas/nuclear power plant just waiting to be used for when the sun doesn't shine or the wind doesn't blow or the lights go out and the country stops. Having the reduntant system dramatically increases costs and reduces efficiency, so those renewables must stay around 10%-15% to be efficient. Coal/gas can get us through a transition for the next 20 years, but after that the reserves that remain will be much more expensive, so we need to start building nuclear reactors in the next 10 years or invent something new or it will be dangerously late. There may 200 years of coal in our country, but especially in the east, the cheap coal will be gone within 10 years. I am a coal mine engineer and currently work at a mine, I know what I'm talking about here. Not sure on the geothermals, I know Iceland does it, but aren't they also more broke than we are. Seems to me there'd be geologic restrictions to doing it on any large scale.
I don't know why you're complaining about moving past 10-15% of total energy from renewables and pushing nuclear when, as I showed above, even this impossible plan from the GOP will only get us to much less than 10% of electricity generation, which itself accounts for a minority of total energy generation. Nuclear power is good and we ought to remove barriers to nuclear generation and deal with waste (however, the extent to which the Federal government is hamstringing nuclear power is way overstated; the government actually subsidizes the industry by providing subsidized insurance against catastrophe and limiting civil claims against plant owners). But it isn't a panacea for all of our energy ills, and it's fundamentally dishonest for people to continue claiming that we can fix anything with even a few hundred nuclear power plants. It might work in France after decades of investment, but France has 1/6 the population of the United States and consumes half as much energy per capita. And even then, nuclear generation provides about 20% of the energy consumed in France.
I'm pretty sure France gets 60% of their power from nuclear. These are rough numbers for us right now: 50% coal, around 15% nuclear, 10% hydro, 20% gas, and 5% renewables. If your 300% off on France's power I would doubt your numbers on the nuclear plants. What numbers are you using for each plants production and our total consumption?
You can check my figures here (pg 6-7) - http://www.industrie.gouv.fr/energie/statisti/pdf/reperes.pdf
Nuclear power accounts for 41% of French energy generation, but only 21% of consumption because of electrical losses. The 60% figure is probably an older figure for the fraction of electricity generation that was nuclear; it's now about 90%. I don't know which of my numbers you were disputing, though.
The numbers behind my first post: a GW power plant generates 3*10^16 joules per year at 100% capacity; we produced 40*10^18 joules of electricity in 2002 (a ratio of 1:1000).
People pushing nuclear as the ultimate solution ignore the large fraction of non-electric energy that is going to have to be displaced by lower emissions generation (electric or otherwise).
Okay so what then would be the solution? if 100 doesn't do it then let's build 200. We need to start training a whole lot of nuclear engineers and technicians if we are going to do it, I don't know anything about it but I really doubt we have the industry established to come close to building even 100 in 10 years like the plan suggests, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do what we can. What is the alternative? The Apostosy fellow below mentions batteries and a hydro kenetic(again, cost?) to enable renewables. I know batteries are too expensive and need to be replaced. New technologies are sexy, yes. Heck cold fusion is a great idea too but the point is we need to do something soon. Its been over 100 years and we are still heating water to make steam to turn turbines, whether its coal, gas, nuclear, or solar thermals. I see a lot criticizism of nuclear and no viable, functional, affordable alternative, just nice ideas.
Nuclear is an important part of the long-term solution (barring unforeseen, game changing new technologies). It's important to remove barriers to nuclear power now, get new plants built (I'd support selling/leasing Federal land to build on), train the engineers to build them, etc. However, building 100 or 200 plants as quickly as is needed to meet immediate carbon emissions goals (if that's even possible) is way more expensive than going about it other ways. I don't mean to criticize nuclear power at all; just the misconception that it alone will fix our problems (of course, the GOP doesn't agree that global warming is a problem). In reality it's a much more minor issue than tackling consumption; it's much cheaper to offset emissions by reducing consumption than cleaning up generation.
I'm talking about electrical power generation, you may be including transportation energy, that could be the difference i guess.
Yeah, I was as I wrote above; also: industrial energy, household heating, etc. If the GOP is serious about either weening us off of foreign oil or lowering carbon emissions, displacing electricity generation with nuclear power is the wrong thing to be talking about. We don't use oil for electricity, and electric generation accounts for only a part (a growing and important part, though) of emissions.
I'm a bedeviled doubter of the severity and immediacy of the warming problem, mainly based on a roughshod review of the IPCC 2007 report on climate change. A few issues I have with their modeling is
1) Force-Feed back variable for warming from water vapor: water vapor is the #1 greenhouse gas, and as the earth warms, the air holds more water, and you get a snowball effect. The variable used for proving the climate models based on historical data(which i also doubt the accuracy of data from 1900 taken from a few labs around the world when compared to what we do today), was changed for future modeling, based on hypothetical changes. I have issues when they change their model between proving it works and using it to forecast for the future.
2) Inability of the model to show cooling in isolated areas that has occured over the past 10 years.
3) Solar forcing specutavely induced in early 1900th in lieu of natural(non solar event induced) to make the model fit better, which in turn lessens the natural warming affect now and attributes more to CO2 and CH4.
4) IPCC's reputation for "sandbagging"- example the 2001 report "hockey-stick" incident. I've also read that each modeling group was allowed to customize forcing for their own model, although I didn't look into that myself.
I may be in denial and searching for problems, but I believe these are not minor errors or problems but serious issues with the models that seem to be defended with a similar fervor that some defend infallibility of the Bible.
I'm not qualified to discuss the validity of the models; I only recognize that the correlation between atmospheric CO2 and temperature is striking and that waiting to see what happens when atmospheric CO2 doubles over the course of my life isn't an experiment I really want to carry out if possible since there's no reversing it if it doesn't pan out.
As far as the models predictive ability goes, I don't get how a model that only claims to predict temperatures several decades out with 95% confidence intervals of a few degrees should be expected to predict much smaller changes on much shorter timescales. That's just a general view of it; I don't know whether the folks designing those models ever made claims as to how well they should be expected to work in the short term.
wvhokie-
The United Nations' climate report is tainted by politics and an agenda.
1) The report doesn't pass the smell test -- see http://energyplanusa.com/ipcc_reports_dont_pass_smell_test.htm.
2) There's been many new climate discoveries since the UN's 1997 Kyoto Protocol that are largely omitted from the reports because, I think, they undercut Kyoto.
3) The report contains much uncertainty and many qualified comments. Given all the scientists admit they don't know, I cannot understand how the report can conclude that CO2 drives global warming.
America needs our own scientific assessment of global warming. I am a Democrat who for the past 20 years believed global warming was caused by CO2. But now after reading the UN reports I suspect the fix was in. The IPCC report contain much good science, but in the end, it's a political organization where politics trumps science. The United States needs our own objective, transparent climate commission to think through global warming. ...before we burden our economy with what are essentially CO2 taxes.
Although I agree with the contention that electricity is the future of energy worldwide, generating that electrical power from nuclear sources is very expensive when compared to other generating methods.
Storing the spent fuel is a major problem for this technology. When one considers the possible security enhancements a world without nuclear fuels could present, it is beneficial to consider other generation alternatives.
Sodium Battery arrays used in Japan and concepts such as Renewable Energy Recombined Hydro Kinetic are examples of new energy storage technologies that will pave the way for wind and solar power to become the bulk of power generation.
Pumping nasty black stuff out of the ground to burn will soon become the way of the past. The "Conservatives" are trying to conserve something, but it's not something you can drink.