Category Archives: photovoltaic

Oyster Creek & Nuclear Power After Fukushima

Oyster Creek Nuclear Power Plant, Courtesy Exelon

A public hearing will take place October 28, 2013, at the Clarion Hotel, 815 Route 37 West, Toms River, NJ. The subject of the hearing will be the National Academy of Sciences, NAS, study on nuclear power plants and cancer and “Lessons Learned from Fukushima.”

As I see it, the most important lessons from Fukushima are:

Three of the Fukushima Dai’ichi nuclear reactors withstood the earthquake, the tsunami and the aftershocks. We can engineer systems that will withstand various scenarios, but this raises the cost such that nuclear cannot compete in a de-regulated energy market – see The Economist, here – and we cannot engineer against all possible events.
The radioactive plume reached across the Pacific to North America, just as the plume from Chernobyl reached across the Atlantic to North America. An accident anywhere, when it involves dispersion of toxic materials, is an accident everywhere,
We have seen four (4) meltdowns in the 54 years between the passage of the Price Anderson Act and the disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima. The risk of a catastrophic accident such as a melt-down may be low, but a catastrophic accident, is by definition, catastrophic.
The losses from Fukushima are estimated in the Trillions of Dollars. The economic value of the electricity produced by the six nuclear reactors is probably less than $100 Billion. Generating electricity from nuclear power is like taking heroin for a headache: The cure is worse than the disease.

There is a fifth lesson to be learned; this from the NJ Clean Energy Program in New Jersey and Vestas, the wind company. As noted on the NJ Clean Energy Program – Project Activity Pages, we in New Jersey now have have 1,117.5 Megawatts (MW) of grid tied photovoltaic solar electric generating capacity, almost double the 636 MW of Oyster Creek. Vestas is offering 8 MW wind turbines.

WE HAVE WIND and SOLAR: WE DON’T NEED OYSTER CREEK OR OTHER NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS.

Offshore Wind Farm

Continue reading →

2012 Revisited

In “The World Will Not End & Other Predictions for 2012, here, I wrote:

“Apple and IBM will continue to thrive. Microsoft will grow, slightly. Dell and HP will thrash. A share of Apple, which sold for $11 in December, 2001, and $380 in Dec. 2011, will sell for $480 in Dec. 2012.” (Mostly Correct, except Apple did better than I expected.)
“The Price of oil will be at $150 to $170 per barrel in Dec., 2012. The price of gasoline will hit $6.00 per gallon in NYC and California.” (Wrong)
There will be another two or three tragic accidents in China. 20,000 people will die. (The number of accidents was underestimate. Their magnitude was overestimated – however … )
There will be a disaster at a nuclear power plant in India, Pakistan, Russia, China, or North Korea. (Wrong)
Wal-Mart will stop growing. Credit Unions, insurance co-ops and Food co-ops, however, will grow 10% to 25%. (Wrong on WalMart, right on Credit Unions, altho the numbers were off.)
The amount of wind and solar energy deployed in the United States will continue to dramatically increase. (Right. Very Right!)
The government of Bashar Al Assad will fall. (Wrong – but there’s still time.)
Foreclosures will continue in the United States. (sadly, true, but not as bad as it could have been – thanks to Obama)
Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio will resign. Calls for Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from matters involving his wife’s clients will become louder, but Justice Thomas will ignore them. A prominent politician who says “Marriage is between a man and a woman,” or her husband, will be “outed” as gay. President Obama will be re-elected.” (Right on Obama and the American voter. Wrong on Arpaio)
The authors of Vapor Trails will not win a Nobel Prize for literature. They will not win a “MacArthur Genius Award.” Nor will I despite my work on this blog or “Sunbathing in Siberia” and the XBColdFingers project. (Right, tho I would have like to have been wrong on this one.)

Here are the details. Continue reading →

Occupy Wall Street – On Energy

Monday, Sept. 17, was the First Anniversary of the “Occupy Wall Street” protests.

The protesters at Occupy are/were demonstrating against the current economic system and to make “Fracking” illegal. (See “Stop Spectra: Resist Fracking in NYC” or “City Limits, Occupy Wall Street, Opposes Fracking“) Energy Policy and Economics … the intersection of energy and economics in the bio-humanosphere – the memes we knit together at Popular Logistics.

My coverage of Occupy Wall Street started on Sept. 22, 2011, with “Protesting Marked Cards and a Stacked Deck.” Quoting Mr. Buffett’s op-ed in the NY Times, “Stop Coddling the Super-Rich,” and citing President Obama’s statement about the American Jobs Act, explained on White House . gov and Talking Points Memo, which Senate Republicans subsequently filibustered, I called for repeal of the “Bush Tax Cuts” on the wealthy, and for passage of Obama’s American Jobs, the so-called Buffett Rule.

I concluded,

Tax policy must be linked to fiscal policy. What we are doing today, Obama, Buffett, and the protesters would say, is using tax policy to make rich people more rich…. we should use tax policy to develop infrastructure… to build a 40 kilowatt photovoltaic solar array on each of the 92,000 public schools in the United States…. This would use tax revenues to pay for infrastructure upgrade – and tax revenues pay public schools electric bills. PV Solar systems provide energy without pollution, without toxic wastes, without greenhouse gases. And in the event of an emergency, if disconnected from the grid, we would have a network of 92,000 local emergency shelters with power during the day, when the sun is shining.

Continue reading →

Question for John Kerry

40 KW Solar array on Whilehall St Ferry Terminal

40 KW PV Solar Array on SI Ferry Terminal

While Chinese subsidies of their solar energy industry have decimated the manufacturing base of the American solar industry, solar energy continues to expand across the country.

What if we stimulated the solar industry with a public works program?

What if we decided to deploy a 40 kilowatt photovoltaic solar array on each of the approximately 90,000 public schools in the country?

The best kept secret in NYC may be found on the Staten Island Ferry, or more precisely, on the south roof of the Whitehall Street terminal. It’s a 40 kilowatt photovoltaic solar array.

Taxpayers pay the electric bills of the ferry terminal, which today are much lower because of the energy the system produces. Taxpayers also pay the electric bills of public schools, courts and other municipal, state and federal office buildings – and the externalized costs of pollution and “health effects” related to mining coal and uranium, drilling oil or frakking gas.

I met Senator John Kerry at the Harvey Nash Inc. Leadership Breakfast at the Plaza Hotel in NYC on Friday, March 2, 2012. At the conclusion I asked him to consider a 40 kw photovoltaic solar energy system on each of the approximately 90,000 public schools in the US.

At $5.00 per watt, which is less than the cost of new nuclear and much less than coal with carbon sequestration, these 90,000 systems would cost $18 billion. They would produce electricity without burning fuel, creating wastes, or creating targets for terrorists, and would pay for themselves in eight to 15 years, depending on the market price of electricity. They would also produce energy for 25 to 40 years – paying for themselves several times over.

This kind of a public works project would create jobs. Even if we didn’t mandate that these used products made in American factories, which I think we should, installation and maintenance would have to be local.

It would also lessen our dependence on fossil fuels.

And each solar energy powered building could be designed to generate electricity during the day during an emergency which shuts down the grid, further enhancing our emergency response capability.

Senator Kerry responded that this would be a perfect project for the Infrastructure Bank that he wants to create. However, the political climate is such that it can’t get done.

Apple, Google, IBM – the way forward

Apple HQ, Cupertino, California

Back in 1965, IBM CEO Thomas J. Watson, Jr, wrote, in IBM’s Basic Beliefs & Principles,

“We accept our responsibilities as a corporate citizen in community, national, and world affairs; we serve our interests best when we serve the public interest…. We want to be at the forefront of those companies which are working to make the world a better place.”

Today, IBM says “Sustainability is no longer an option. Sustainability is an imperative.” IBM is focused on making data centers and supply chains more efficient, and providing their customers with tools to become less unsustainable (IBM green blog). The European Commission awarded IBM for energy efficiency at 27 data centers (IBM Press Release).

However, it looks to me that Google and Apple are one or two steps ahead of IBM. Google has invested $915 Million in solar arrays, which should be 1.0 to 1.5 MW. Apple is putting a 5MW solar array on the roof of it’s headquarters in Cupertino, pictured above, and described here on Treehugger and here on 9to5mac. Apple is also using solar and biofuel to power it’s new data center in South Carolina (article in Renewable Energy World). Essentially:

A 100-acre, 20 megawatt (MW) solar array, supplying 42 million kWh of energy each year.
A 5 MW biogas system to come online later this year, providing another 40 million kWh of 24×7 baseload renewable energy annually. Apple claims this will be the largest non-utility-owned fuel cell installation in the US.
Combined, that’s 82 million kWh/year of onsite renewable energy generation at the facility.

For more details, see the 2012 Apple Facilities Report.

Apple’s building may be a derivative design of the Widex headquarters, in Allerød, Denmark, described on Widex home page, here. The Widex building is a ring that surrounds a large atrium courtyard to be planted with grass, flowers and trees and is according to Widex,”designed to be both pleasant to look at and be in…. and environmentally friendly

Heat for the building will be supplied by a geothermal system, where groundwater is used like a heat reservoir; excess heat in summer can be stored and used when needed during winter. Our ambition is to reduce energy consumption by 75 percent compared to traditional technology.

Apple, Google, and IBM report high profits. Their stock prices are also high, perhaps demonstrating the correlation between doing well and doing good.

21 of 2011 – Most Significant Events of the Year

Tweet While it ain’t over till it’s over, 2011 is over. A lot that could have happened, didn’t. Obama didn’t resign, Donald Trump didn’t throw his hat into the ring or divorce his current wife and marry one or more Kardashians. Newt Gingrich threw his hat into the ring, but also didn’t divorce his current wife and marry one or more Kardashians. These are the most significant events of 2011.

Japan, March, 2011 . Nebraska, June, 2011. An earthquake triggered a tsunami which slammed Japan with a 30 foot wave, which shut down twelve nuclear reactors at three sites, triggering melt-downs in three reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi site. We now see radioactive particles in food and soil in Fukushima Prefecture. The United States government recommended an evacuation of a 50 mile radius from the plant – this is a semi-circular no-man’s land of 3,927 square miles. It would be 7,854 square miles but the plant was on the coast and therefore half of this radioactive no-man’s land is in the Pacific Ocean. The environmental ramifications of radioactive materials spreading over Japan and flowing into the Pacific Ocean are not known (Popular Logistics click here, here, here), however, liabilities to TEPCO and Japan are estimated to $100 Billion (click here). In the United States, two nuclear power plants on the Missouri River, the Fort Calhoun and Cooper plants, were shut-down when the Missouri River flooded (Popular Logistics, here). Eight nuclear power plants from South Carolina to Connecticut were shut down in the aftermath of the earthquake that struck with an epicenter in Virginia August 23, 2011, and Hurricane Irene a few days later (Popular Logistics, here). In the words of Mycle Schneider, describing the World Watch Institute report he authored, “The industry was arguably on life support before Fukushima. When the history of this industry is written, Fukushima is likely to introduce its final chapter,” (click here). However, the three melt-downs at Fukushima, coupled with the melt-down at Chernobyl in 1986 and the partial melt-down at Three Mile Island in 1979, suggest a probability of one melt-down every 14 years.
South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont, August, 2011. Hurricane Irene covered an area of approximately 170,000 square miles, or about the size of California.”
Washington, DC, December. 2011. After 4,000 Americans were killed, about 50,000 were wounded, and $1 trillion was spent over 8 years, President Obama ended the American mission in Iraq that Congress authorized in October, 2002, President Bush started in March, 2003 and declared “Accomplished” in May, 2003 (for a timeline, click here).
Washington DC, Abbottabod, Pakistan, May, 2011, American soldiers, on orders from the White House, found and killed Osama bin Laden in a compound in Pakistan (NY Times, click here).
Yemen, In summer, 2011, American military forces, using a drone aircraft piloted from the ground via remote control, from the ground, targeted and killed Anwar al Awlaki, an American born Al Queda operative in Yemen (NY Times, click here).
The hacking group “Anonymous” broke into the computers of the security consulting group “Stratfor” and found 44,188 Encrypted Passwords, of which roughly 50% could be easily cracked. 73.7% of decrypted passwords were weak” (NPR, click here).
The “Stuxnet” computer worm virus, harmelss on PC’s runing MS Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, and other computers, appears to have targeted centrifuges used in the Iranian uranium enrichment facilities. While the viruses were discovered in 2010, they became understood in 2011. The virus caused the centrifuges to spin out of control, wrecking themselves (NY Times, here, NPR here, CNET here, Wikipedia here). Continue reading →

Furman Appointed to Manalapan Township Finance Committee

Lawrence J. Furman, MBA, co-founder of Popular Logistics, has been appointed to the Manalapan Township Finance Committee (Township here, news article here). The Finance Committee reviews expenditures, projects tax receipts, and submits the budget to the Township Committee. Back in 2007 Furman suggested that the Township Committee look into deploying solar energy systems on municipal properties. He was appointed to the Manalapan Township Environmental Commission in 2007, served for two years. In 2008, he ran for School Board with a platform built around solar energy for the schools. While he lost the election, and Manalapan does not yet have solar energy systems on municipal properties or schools (are these related?) people are talking about it. He earned his MBA in Managing for Sustainability from Marlboro College in December, 2010.

He has delivered various iterations of a talk entitled “Beyond Fuel: Energy in the 21st Century,” at the June meeting of the NYC Business Sustainability Action Round-Table, NYC B Smart, and in September, 2011 at the Space Coast Green Living Festival, Cocoa Beach, Florida.

Furman has been thinking about energy and what we now call sustainability since 1976, when, as a student intern with the New York Public Interest Research Group, Inc., NYPIRG, at Rachel Carson College, then at the State University of New York University of Buffalo, he helped develop a case for offshore wind power. His testimony, delivered to the “NY State Legislative Committee on Energy, the Economy, and the Environment” stated:

We could power the New York City Subway System with a battery of wind driven electric turbines, located off the shores of Long Island. It would burn no fuel, and, therefore, unlike coal, oil, gas, and nuclear power, create no waste.

When you factor in the life cycle of the fuel, and the pollution and health costs of the wastes, this would be less expensive than the fuel based alternatives.

Reflecting on this today, he said,

“My colleagues and I knew what we were talking about, but the Committee members didn’t get it. Sadly, it seems that the Committee’s name – Energy, the Economy, and the Environment – indicated it’s priorities.”

“If the cheapest unit of energy, the ‘negawatt,’ is the unit of energy that you don’t need, then the next cheapest is the ‘nega-fuel-watt,’ the unit of enegy you obtain without consuming fuel.”

On this committee I intend to look at our energy expenses and see where we can save money in the long term with PV Solar, LED lighting, insulation, micro-hydro, etc.

Moore's Law Applied to Solar Power

Does “Moore’s Law” hold for Solar Power?

In New Jersey, between 2001 and 2010, we went from a total of six systems with a combined capacity of 9.0 KW to about 7000 systems with a combined capacity of 211,000 KW or 211 MW. This is illustrated below.

Solar Capacity, NJ, 2001 to 2010. Increase from 9 KW in 6 systems to 211 MW, or 211,000 KW in 7000 systems

Increase from 9 KW in 6 systems to 211,000 KW in 7,000 systems. Copyright, 2010, L. J. Furman. All Rights Reseved.

This is the “hockey stick” curve of exponential growth typical of positive feedback mechanisms. I expect this kind of growth to continue for the next few years as prices drop, until solar meets 25% to 35% of New Jersey’s needs. This would be another 2500 to 3500 systems and about 200 additional MW in 2011 and 4000 to 5000 systems of 300 to 500 MW in 2012 , and brings me back to “Does ‘Moore’s Law,’ or a corollary, apply to PV Solar?” or “Is this a bubble?” Continue reading →

100% Clean Renewable Energy in 25 Years

Tweet The observable fact that dolphins surf is something we humans need to think about.

Amory Lovins, of the Rocky Mountain Institute, coined the term “Negawatt” when he said “The cheapest unit of energy is the one you don’t have to buy.” The next cheapest, the “Nega-Fuel-Watt” is the unit of energy that doesn’t require fuel.

Insulation Nega-Watts allow less power to heat or cool a given space.
Solar Nega-Fuel-Watts transform photons into electricity or heat.
Wind Nega-Fuel-Watts transform moving particles of air into electricity.
Geothermal Nega-Fuel-Watts transform the heat of the earth into heat or electricity, or use thermal gradients to cool a space.
Hydro Nega-Fuel-Watts transform moving particles of water – currents – to generate electricity.

100% Clean Energy
100 Gigawatts Wind	$300 Billion
100 GW Marine Hydro	$300 B
50 GW Solar	$200 B
50 GW Geothermal	$200 B
200 GW Equiv Efficiency	$200 B
A Smart Grid	$100 B
500 GW or GW Equiv.	$1.3 Trillion

I’m not sure if Lovins first public use of the term Negawatts was in Montreal in 1989 (here) or in Foreign Affairs in 1976 (abstract here), whether 22 or 35 years ago. Regardless, our current energy paradigm today is the hard fuel based path Lovins criticized 35 years ago. While we are turning away from nuclear, as documented by Mycle Schneider in the WorldWatch Report (here) – the latest radioactive nail in the radioactive coffin being the fatal explosion at a reprocessing facility in France on Monday, Sept. 12, 2011 (here) – we burn literally mountains of coal and oceans of oil and gas (According to the DoE, in 2010 we burned 1,085,281 thousand short tons of coal and 15,022 thousand short tons of coke (here). And there are consequences. We suffer oil spills, polluted water, mercury, coal mine disasters, nuclear power plant melt-downs, we fight wars …

Wind and solar don’t burn fuel. The winds blow, the sun shines, you put a widget in the path of those moving particles in the air or those photons of light and you get electricity – without greenhouse gases, radioactive wastes, toxic wastes, and it costs less. So the question is not ‘Can we meet our energy needs with clean, sustainable renewable energy technologies?” The real question are How? How Much? And How quickly?

We could do it in 25 years if we wanted to. And we should, for our children, our grandchildren, the cetaceans with whom we share our oceans, and other charismatic megafauna with whom we share our world.

Saving the Economy, Part Deux

Tweet In Part 1, I criticized “How to Really Save the Economy“, an op-ed in the New York Times, published Sept. 10, 2011. So how do we really save the economy?

“One of the best kept secrets in New York City,” I wrote, “is the existence of a 40 kilowatt (KW) photovoltaic solar array on the Whitehall Street terminal of the Staten Island Ferry,” pictured above, and first covered in Popular Logistics in 2007, here.

There are 90,000 public schools in the United States. Suppose we were to install a 40 KW solar energy system on each of them. PV solar modules require very little maintenance over their 35 to 45 year life expectancy. My initial thought was $5 per watt or $5,000 per kilowatt, but $4,000 per kilowatt is more realistic for the near term price of solar, particularly at the utility scale. This is where we expect the cost of solar in the Q4 2012 timeframe, without subsidies.

At $4,000 per KW of nameplate capacity, each of these 90,000 systems would cost $160,000. This 3.6 gigawatts of distributed daylight-only capacity would cost about $14.4 billion.

It seems to make sense to use taxpayer monies to finance these systems; taxpayers pay the electric bills for public schools and other public infrastructure, so rather than pay a utility to burn coal, oil, or gas, or harness nuclear fission, we could buy solar modules, put them on the roof and transform sunlight into electricity. But what are the other implications? What would it give us? And what do we do at night? How much juice do we get?

The US Dept. of Energy’s (DOE) National Renewable Energy Lab’s (NREL) PV Watts solar energy calculator tells you the power you can expect from a given solar system anywhere in the US. Regarding night-time; solar is effective in conjunction with other sources of energy, and other clean, renewable, sustainable sources include wind, geothermal, micro-hydro, biofuel.

Every public school in the country would have a power plant that generates power, during the day, with no fuel cost and no waste., and no associated mining, processing, transportation, fuel costs and no waste management costs. At $5.00 per watt, or $5 billion per gigawatt, the capital costs are lower than the costs of new nuclear and significantly lower than the costs of coal with carbon sequestration, with none of the risks or hazards associated with the systems: no arsenic, mercury, lead, thorium, uranium, zinc, or carbon.

The systems would be tied to the electric grid, after all, while most of their operations are during the day, schools need power at night. If these systems could be disconnected from the electric grid, then we would have 90,000 structures distributed all over the United States, with power during the day in the event of power outages from storms, earthquakes, accidents, etc. Even if we lost 10% of them in a disaster like Katrina, or an event like Irene or the recent earthquake, we would still have 81,000 all over the country. Coupled with efficient refrigeration systems, we would have shelters with power to keep food and medications cold during emergencies; and these would be distributed across the country.

The solar systems would obviously have to be installed here, which would stimulate the economy, and we could even require the components to be manufactured here, further stimulating the economy.

Why not business as usual?

As reported here the North Anna nuclear plants in Virginia were shut down during the earthquake a few days before hurricane Irene. The Dominion plants in Virginia, and the Oyster Creek plant in New Jersey were shut down and the Millstone 2 & 3 plants in Connecticut and the Brunswick plants in North Carolina were brought to reduced capacity during Irene, and the Fort Calhoun plant in Nebraska has been shut down due to flooding, and losing $1 million per day, since June 6, 2011.

In Part 1, I criticized “How to Really Save the Economy, “an op-ed in the New York Times, published Sept. 10, 2011. “The United States,” according to Robert Barro, who teaches economics at Harvard and is a “fellow” at the Hoover Institution, “is in the third year of a grand experiment by the Obama administration.”

“This is inaccurate,” I wrote, Obama is the President, but the US Constitution provides a framework in which power is divided into three branches of the Federal government, and the power of the each of the branches is checked and balanced by the others, and “all power not expressly granted to the federal government is held by the states and the citizens.” It would be more accurate, therefore, to say,

“The United States is in the third year of an experiment in governance between the Obama administration, the Congress, the Judiciary, the Republican Party, various special interests, and the citizens. This appears to be an experiment in governance by not-governing. Due to significant differences of opinion with regards to the direction in which to drive the ship of state, the ship of state appears to be floundering. Governance by not-governing doesn’t work!”

In parts 3 and 4 I hope to present feedback from the telecommunications and wind industries. Meanwhile, another radioactive nail in the nuclear coffin – an explosion in a low-level waste management facility in France killed one person and injured four. DC Bureau, Associated Press reports “An explosion at a nuclear waste facility in southern France killed one person and injured four on Monday. Authorities said there was no radioactive leak, but critics urged France to rethink its nuclear power in the wake of the catastrophe at Japan’s Fukushima plant.The Nuclear Safety Authority declared the accident “terminated” soon after the blast at a furnace in the Centraco site, in the southern Languedoc-Roussillon region, about 20 miles (32 kilometers) from the city of Avignon. One of the injured suffered severe burns…. the body was burned so badly it was carbonized”

In Jersey Three Strikes Equals a Home Run

Tweet

Strike 1 – Solar Power

When the NJ Clean Energy Program started in 2001, there were six (6) solar energy systems and a nameplate capacity of nine (9) kilowatts. By December 31, 2010 there were over 7000 systems with a combined capacity close to 300 megawatts, MW, of solar electric generating capacity. In the first six months of 2011, another 100 MW was added, bringing the total to 400 MW by June 30, 2011. By these metrics, the NJ Clean Energy Program has been successful.

Continue reading →

Virginia Nuclear Reactors Shut Down Due To Earthquake

Andrew Restuccia and Ben German reported (here) on E2 Wire, “the Hill’s Energy & Environment Blog” that:

Two nuclear reactors at the North Anna Power Station in Louisa County, Va., automatically shut down Tuesday shortly after a magnitude-5.9 earthquake shook the state and surrounding area.

The plant lost offsite power and is now running its cooling systems on diesel generators….

A dozen nuclear plants in the eastern part of the United States have declared “unusual events” because of the earthquake.

It’s good to know that the diesel powered emergency cooling systems are operational, and the operators (presumably) have sufficient fuel to keep the cooling systems running during the emergency.

But …

How long will the plants be offline?
Don’t we need the power those plants would generate during and in the immediate aftermath of an earthquake?

This illustrates a major problem with nuclear power:

Rather than enhance the security of the grid and infrastructure nuclear power must be shut down during certain classes of emergency.

A 1.0 gigawatt nuclear power plant is made up of one or two reactors. Both must be shut down during an earthquake, however, as we saw from the melt-downs in Japan, the emergency cooling system must stay up. A 1.0 gigawatt wind farm is made up of 286 separate and discrete turbines of 3.5 mw each. A 1.0 gigawatt solar farm is made up of 5 million 200 watt modules and thousands of inverters. These are made up of hundreds or thousands of identical modules. Like nuclear power plants, they can be engineered to withstand earthquakes. But unlike nuclear power plants THEY DON’T NEED EMERGENCY POWER DURING THE EMERGENCY! And even if a few solar modules or wind turbines fail due to an earthquake and aftershocks, most will come on after the storm! And there is no fossil fuel based emergency cooling system needed for solar power or wind power systems!

"Beyond Fuel" at the Space Coast Green Living Festival

Green Living Festival

Tweet I am presenting “Beyond Fuel: From Consuming Natural Resources to Harnessing Natural Processes,” a discussion of the hidden costs, or “economic externalities,” of nuclear power, coal, and oil, and the non-obvious benefits of wind, solar, marine hydro and efficiency at the Sp ace Coast Green Living Festival, Cocoa Beach, Florida, Sept 17, 2011.

The festival is sponsored by the Cocoa Beach Surfrider Foundation and the Sierra Club Turtle Coast Group. It will be at the Cocoa Beach Courtyard by Marriott.

Continue reading →

Why the TVA Wants Nuclear Power

In “Why We Still Need Nuclear,” the “op-ed” piece written in the New York Times, July 30, 2011, Tom Kilgore, the President and CEO of the Tennessee Valley Authority, seems to have made up his mind to attempt to complete the Bellefonte 1 nuclear power plant, in Hollywood, Alabama. Mr. Kilgore is in good company: the President of Iran, Mahmoud Achmadinejad, also wants to build nuclear power plants.

The TVA began work on the Bellefonte nuclear plants in 1974. Construction was suspended in 1988, after the TVA spent about $4.1 Billion on the plant. The TVA wants to spend another $5 Billion over the next six to eight years to complete the plant. It would therefore cost a total of $9.1 Billion to construct a 1.26 gigawatt plant. That’s $7.22 Billion per gigawatt, plus interest, over a period that spans 34 years, with construction in three phases: 14 years of work from ’74 to ’88, 22 years of non-work, from ’88 to 2012, and another six to eight years of work. (Times Free Press, TVA News, TVA Environment).

This suggests the real reason why the TVA wants to complete the plant. Currently Bellefonte 1 a $4.1 billion liability on the TVA’s books. If the TVA adds another $5 Billion, this $4.1 hot white elephant will be magically transformed into a cool (but heat producing) 9.1 billion asset. Continue reading →