An Effort to Score US Coal to Nuclear Plant Conversions.
The paper to which I'll refer in this post is this one: Muhammad R. Abdussami, Kevin Daley, Gabrielle Hoelzle, Aditi Verma, Investigation of potential sites for coal-to-nuclear energy transitions in the United States, Energy Reports, Volume 11, 2024, Pages 5383-5399.
The paper is free to read under a creative commons license; nevertheless I'll briefly excerpt a few bits of text from it and make a few comments.
The authors are from the University of Michigan's fine nuclear engineering program, and thus they are experts in nuclear energy, as opposed to people who, for instance, play the guitar very well and think this gives them license to make comments about nuclear energy, a subject about which they know nothing at all, but nonetheless insipidly pontificate.
(When I grew up, I realized it's kind of strange to watch Bonnie Raitt or Jackson Brown stand in front of walls of electric amplifiers under arrays of high powered colored Klieg lights at "No Nukes" concerts. This is almost Trumpian scale hypocrisy.)
My impression is that most of the fine young people involved today in nuclear engineering programs are there because they give far more than a rat's ass about climate change than either Bonnie Raitt or Jackson Brown, and no, few nuclear engineering students would deign to, or be qualified, to tell Bonnie Raitt - a fine singer and guitarist whose musical work I admired and to which I appealed when I was playing in clubs - about how or whether to sing or about how or whether to play the slide guitar.
Expertise and skill matter, no matter what one does. One might be very good at one thing; and be as ignorant and incompetent as hell in another.
As evidence that nuclear engineers, unlike some guitarists, give more than a rat's ass about climate change, I quote this text from the paper:
...Acknowledging the pressing need to address climate change, utilities across the nation have incorporated the transition from coal-fired generation to cleaner energy resources into their Integrated Resource Plans (IRPs)...replacing or repurposing coal-fired generation with zero carbon emission energy sources, such as nuclear power, emerges as a critical opportunity to significantly reduce GHG emissions and facilitate the implementation of utilities' IRPs.
The text includes reference to so called "renewable energy" and its allegedly declining cost (which to my mind buries the extreme economic and environmental cost of the requirement for redundancy, vast land use changes, extremely wasteful mass intensity and short lifetimes) while ignoring the fact that while coal is pernicious, it is something so called "renewable energy" isn't, reliable. One measure of poverty is a lack of access to reliable energy. When Germany made the dangerous and obscene decision to phase out nuclear energy - an expression of contempt for the issue of extreme global warming - they replaced the energy produced by nuclear plants with coal.
The paper, which is again, open for anyone to read, sets us a series of "weights" including, but hardly limited to, political issues, things like poorly thought out and extremely dangerous "nuclear moratoriums." Then the paper constructs formulae for a kind of combinatorial optimization about which plants are best suited for doing the opposite of German energy policy, going from coal to nuclear.
Some of this criteria, from a loose read of the paper, involves the issue of "safety." In my opinion nuclear energy, an opinion which I adopted after hearing it from a lecture by the great nuclear engineer Alvin Weinberg, cannot be made "safer." Any money to do so will be wasted. As is true for all sources of energy, nuclear energy cannot be made risk free. It is merely risk minimized, merely vastly superior to everything else. I say this as if this were a "mere" thing. In the age of sound bite poorly thought out rhetoric, even obvious things get buried, often by insipid media hype, inattention, or attention directed at the wrong things. (Joe Biden is "senile," but the rapist convicted felon isn't? Really?)
For example, whipped up fear of radiation at the much hyped Fukushima natural disaster killed more people than radiation itself did, the latter number of instances being at or close to zero.
cf: Comparison of mortality patterns after the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant radiation disaster and during the COVID-19 pandemic ( Motohiro Tsuboi et al 2022 J. Radiol. Prot. 42 031502)
It is a matter of fact that worldwide, in the history of nuclear energy, all of the accidents connected with nuclear power plant failures (we all know what they are since so much harping about them takes place) have not killed as many people as die each day from the normal operation of coal, and for that matter, gas plants. Extreme global heating is adding to the toll of the associated chemical toxicology of fossil fuel waste, for which the daily death toll is enormous.
The idea behind this paper is that much of the infrastructure surrounding retired or replaced coal plants is available at low cost for repurposing, including infrastructure such as power lines, land, electrical equipment, and even things like turbines and steam condensation equipment.
This approach is not limited to the United States, where in any case, it is just the subject of study. It is a matter of policy in places like Poland. Poland does Germany a favor by keeping Germany from having the worst carbon intensity for electricity production in Europe, preventing Germany from holding that title among major European nations. Unlike Germany, Poland is planning on doing something about that fact.
In any case, any effort under any conditions to replace coal with nuclear will reduce risks to human health and to the future of humanity and indeed the planet. One can easily extend the case by replacing the word "coal" in the previous sentence with the words "natural gas." Natural gas is also an unacceptably dangerous fuel.
Have a nice weekend.
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