According to the research firm IHS, 2013 should see the installation of 35 GW of photovoltaic (PV) systems worldwide, up from 32 GW in 2012. The IHS projection through 2017 is that the PV market will rise to 61 GW annually, with a 2013-2017 total of 242 GW.
(Click image to enlarge)
If we project that the 2010-2017 average growth rate of 17.6% continues, annual PV installation would reach 99GW in 2020, for a 2013-2020 total of 497 GW, 413 GW more than nuclear. Of course, sheer capacity isn't the whole story. Not every power plant runs 100% of the time.
According to the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry average capacity factor for nuclear power plants is 86%. That is the comparison between how much energy they actually produce in a year and how much they would theoretically produce if they ran 100% of the time. In reality they have fueling and maintenance outages as well as unscheduled shutdowns.
The capacity factor of photovoltaic systems varies according to the local climate. In the continental U.S., the output of a 1,000 watt system might vary from 1,100 kilowatt-hours annually in Seattle to 1,700 kWh in Dagget California, in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Given 8760 hours in a year, this is a capacity factor of between 12.5% and 19.4%. Call it an average of 16%.
Apply that to our projected 497 GW and in 2020 the 2013-2020 PV installations would be producing 79.52 GW-hours annually. Meanwhile, that 84 GW of nuclear at 86% capacity will be producing 72.24 GW-hours annually. That is, if there is enough nuclear fuel at an affordable price. I imagine that the sun will still be shining in 2020.
The recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan is shocking beyond its numbers. There are thousands dead and hundreds of thousands homeless. The economic damage is immense. Well beyond that is its impact on our sense of scale, our sense of the human place in the world. Here is a video clip that had me transfixed in horror:
One could look at that scene and conclude that nature is cruel. That would be wrong. It's worse than that; nature just is. Cruelty is a human trait and has a human scale. We can negotiate with cruelty. We can fight it. We can arrest it, try it, convict and imprison it. We can reeducate it, or wait it out. Nature is there forever, and it is unconscious and without intent.
I'm sharing this video clip with you not to shock you, but to remind you of our scale. It's not a kind thing to do, and I apologize. A friend of mine once said that a certain amount of delusion was necessary to stay sane, and I suppose I'm threatening that. However, a regular reminder of our place in the world is a mental tonic; not good tasting, but it clears the mind.
There is an area around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant that will be off limits for human habitation for, what, decades? Centuries? With luck, the area around the Fukushima nuclear plant won’t be contaminated and people will be able to move back – if they actually want to. With a little less luck Japan could lose some land area essentially forever. Is this a level of risk we should be taking, especially given that there are alternatives? I say no. Don’t juggle hand grenades if tennis balls are available.
The Fukushima disaster hits close because here in Vermont we have a nuclear power plant that is the same age and design as the Fukishima reactors. It is the outdated and unsafe GE Mark 1 design, and it is coming up on its 40th birthday. It has been leaking tritium and perhaps other things for some months. Its owner, Entergy, has been lying to state regulators and coping with drunken employees. 75 miles east-southeast lies the greater Boston metropolitan area, with a population of 4.5 million. It’s the unimaginable waiting to happen. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, in a move that surprised nobody, just re-upped its operating license for another 20 years.
As Japanese workers valiantly attempt to cool down those leaking reactors that were wrecked by the earthquake and tsunami, we should rethink risk and our ability to manage risk. We are, as a species, a glass cannon. That is an expression from the world of fiction meaning a character that can inflict terrible damage but can’t take a punch. We can be incredibly destructive en masse, but as individuals and as communities we are vulnerable to what nature can dish out. Likewise our complex structures, both social and technological.
Engineers regularly design mechanical systems to endure natural disasters. The point is to predict the worst things that could happen and build in enough redundancy so that in the worst case scenario the system still has one level of safety left. As we have seen, nature can defy our predictions and wipe away that last level of protection. Taking it as a given that our systems will sometimes be overwhelmed by events, we have to start thinking about the consequences of absolute failure.
If a wind turbine has an absolute failure and falls over, I suppose it could land on someone. The same goes for a rack of solar panels. However, the fall zone would not be rendered uninhabitable for centuries. Cancer deaths would not spike downwind. An entire wind farm could go over all at once and the nearest city would not have to be evacuated.
We seem to have reached a scavenging age in the pursuit of non-renewable energy. We have decades-old power plants and decades-old oil fields starting to fail. We are exploring for oil at extreme ocean depths with the associated extreme risks. We are strip mining and processing tar sands that nobody in the business would have bothered with a few decades ago. We are blasting the tops off of mountains for coal and engaging in the dangerous re-mining of old deposits. As we start to scramble, the risks per ton, per barrel, per gallon, per kilowatt-hour are going up.
We can’t keep reassuring ourselves that we’ve got it all under control and that the worst will never happen. It’s time to look with an unflinching gaze at worst case scenarios and ask ourselves, “Are we willing to accept this level of destruction as the cost of temporarily keeping the status quo?” The answer, in many cases, will be no. We’ll have to face up to fundamental changes in the way we live. We’ll have to balance present convenience against future consequences. There are no easy answers, but pretending that everything will be ok is no answer either.
Here’s an overview of the nuclear power crisis in Japan. History will probably overtake this post within a day, but I thought people might like a general picture of the problems.
The worst hit plant is Fukushima Dai-ichi, located about 180 miles north of Tokyo on the east coast of Japan’s main island of Honshu. It is a set of six boiling water reactors, meaning that the water heated by the nuclear reaction is not pressurized, so it boils. This is an important point, which I will get to later.
Three of the six reactors were operating at the time the earthquake hit. They all immediately shut down. That means that a number of rods were dropped into each reactor core, these rods absorbing radiation and stopping the reaction. The problem is that the cores of these reactors don’t immediately cool down, so the cooling water needs to circulate through them for another week. During a normal shutdown the cooling water pumps run on electricity from the utility grid. This being absent, the pumps are powered by diesel generators on site. In this case, the generators were swamped by the tsunami, so the pumps fell back on batteries, the problem being that the batteries can only power the pumps for 8 hours.
Adding to the problem, each reactor has a pool of water holding used fuel rods. These pools need to have water circulated through them to keep the spent rods cool, although to a lesser extent than the reactor cores. Some of these pools lack circulating water due to the multiple failures and are starting to boil off their water. The danger is that if the spent rods are exposed they could catch fire and spew radioactive particles into the air.
Already there have been releases of radiation. Units 1, 2, and 3 are all at risk, with the cores of all three having been exposed several times and partially melted. The pool on Unit #4 is at risk of exposure. Local residents have been evacuated, and even outside the evacuation zone people have been ordered to stay indoors.
Those explosions you may have seen on television were from hydrogen produced when steam reacted with the superheated casings of the nuclear fuel rods. The hydrogen vented out of the steel and concrete containment vessel and into the building around it. Usually any gas that gets vented into this building gets run through filters to remove radioactive particles and is then blown off, but the venting system was overwhelmed and the hydrogen built up and detonated. Now any radioactive gas that gets vented from those primary containment vessels goes directly into the atmosphere.
Japanese utility workers have been flooding the cores of reactors 1-3 with seawater in an attempt to keep the cores cool. Apparently they have also been mixing some boron containing compound into the water as well. Boron absorbs the neutrons that maintain a nuclear reaction, so this gives double duty, cooling and slowing the reaction at the same time.
There is presently a problem in the #2 reactor, in that the operators can't open the pressure relief valves. The pressure has built up to the point where they are unable to pump water into the core. Unless the valves open on their own, this can't end well.
Key concept: Flooding a boiling water reactor with seawater and boron is a permanent shut down. The Japanese authorities decided that the situation was bad enough to write off these reactors forever.
Second key concept: A small percentage of the fuel rods in reactor #3 are mixed oxide, or MOX, meaning that they contain plutonium as well as the usual uranium. This raises the probability of containment failure, because the plutonium helps to keep the reaction going and because it tends to create more gas when the core gets uncovered. It also poses a higher cancer risk than pure uranium.
Third key concept: These reactors are 40 years old, of a type called the General Electric Mark 1. There have always been questions about the probability of catastrophic failure with this design. This is, by the way, the same age and design as our own Entergy/Vermont Yankee plant in Vernon, as well as 22 other plants in the U.S.
A good site for ongoing information about the Fukushima plant, with excellent explanations of the technology, is at the Union of Concerned Scientists website.
I don’t generally cross-post, but Maggie Gunderson over at Green Mountain Daily (a fine site, by the way) came up with a good story from the files of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
To quote from the piece:
“FITNESS FOR DUTY - SUPERVISOR TESTED POSITIVE FOR ALCOHOL was today's posting on the NRC Website for current event notifications.
A non-licensed employee supervisor had a confirmed positive for alcohol during a random fitness-for-duty test. The employee's unescorted access to the plant has been revoked. Contact the Headquarters Operations Officer for additional details.
What is a non-licensed employee supervisor? Well, that means he was not one of the plant operators, but is a supervisor of another group, like engineering, maintenance, purchasing, or even health physics meaning dose measurement.”
As it turns out, it was a maintenance supervisor. You know, one of the people responsible for keeping the place bolted together so the radioactivity stays on the inside. The guy blew into the Breathalyzer sometime before 9:44 AM on September 1st and copped something over .04% blood alcohol concentration (BAC), which is the legal limit for operating a nuclear plant on the power superhighway.
I should note that we are one up on the Byron nuclear plant in Illinois. Just a minute later on the same morning one of their actual plant operators tooted the booze whistle and got nailed.
Susan Smallheer wrote it up for the Rutland Herald, reporting thus: “The employee must also go through a mandated employee-assistance program and, depending on the results of that program, the employee could be back on the job in two weeks, Smith said.”
This raises a number of concerns for me. First, am I just a worrier, or does a .04% plus BAC in the forenoon indicate an alcohol problem that won’t go away with two weeks of “employee assistance”? Second, given the random nature of testing, how long had this employee been dousing his Wheaties with beer before he got caught?
Third, as Smallheer reports, this is the third banned substance incident at Vermont Yankee in the past two years. This included a stoned control room operator and the actual administrative assistant tasked with giving the Breathalyzer tests getting busted for being north of .04. There is a basic principle of both Human Resources Management and being a bar bouncer. Your success is not measured by how many bozos you throw out. It is measured by how many you prevent from coming in. With the high turnover rate at Vermont Yankee they seem to be coming up short on that.
Fourth, .04 BAC? Really? I could blow a .039 and legally stroll into the plant for a little Homer Simpson wrench twisting?
And how many drinks get someone to .04 BAC? Defining a drink as ½ ounce of ethyl alcohol, or a 12 ounce beer, a 4 ounce glass of wine, or a 1.25 ounce shot of liquor, a 180 pound man would have to consume three drinks in an hour or four drinks over two hours.
Considering that the test occurred at 9:44 AM, I’d assume that the guy in question had been either at work or commuting for at least the past hour. That tells me that he hadn’t just snapped back a quick Irish coffee to beat a hangover. And .04 BAC is the minimum we can assume. The evidence points to a bottle-heavy breakfast for our hero. Yes, a couple of weeks of counseling and a “cross my heart, hope to die” promise and he’ll be ready once again to supervise the maintenance of our aging nuclear plant. With luck he will be able to prevent more incidents like this:
And this:
The State of Vermont needs to crack down on Vermont Yankee and then shut down Vermont Yankee. This is not a situation where I want to be able to say “I told you so.”
Friday, June 7, 2013 at 8:34PM ;)
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