Great Britain Finds it Needs More Nuclear Power

Like Germany before it, the United Kingdom is finding that it needs more nuclear power plants:

* UK will press "all buttons" to get nuclear built
* nuclear is a "no-brainer" because it contributes to energy security and job creation
* "insecure international sources underline the case for a diverse mix"
* "determined to get nuclear up and running as soon as possible"
* nuclear industry could create 100,000 new direct jobs
* Britain needs to move fast to establish position in international market
* all of the above is part of the need to "spotlight" the opportunities available

There are several factors pushing the UK government’s rapidly growing interest in building new nuclear power plants.

* Natural gas production in the North Sea is falling more rapidly than expected.
* Russia is a major European gas supplier, but its reliability is increasingly in question.
* Iran is another big gas supplier to Europe with questionable reliability.
* Alternative energy programs are not delivering power as rapidly as expected.
* Carbon emissions concerns have changed the status of coal as an energy fuel.
* Existing UK nuclear plants have a limited life remaining. (Note: It is possible to extend the life of these facilities.)

I'm all for solar energy, as is quite obvious to any reader here, but I think we're going to need expanded nuclear power too. I'd rather we build nuclear- and solar- and wind-powered energy generation than another coal- or natural gas-powered plant, which will only continue to exacerbate the problem of global warming.

If we want to continue feeding hard currency to Iran, Saudi Arabia and Russia, by all means, let's continue the informal ban on nuclear power. If we're serious about green energy generation, though, we might want to add nuclear power to the mix of clean energy options available to us.

America Needs Engineers!

Mars may need more women, but America needs more engineers.

This impressive young man, William Yuan, is exactly what we need -- except we need his sort of talent, ingenuity and engineering know-how by the hundreds of thousands, if not the millions.

Oh, yes, he's only twelve years old:

...a 12 year old boy in Beaverton, Oregon recently developed a new type of 3D solar cell that makes other solar cells look inefficient by comparison.

William Yuan’s 3D cell can absorb both visible and UV light. According to his calculations, solar panels equipped with his 3D cells could provide 500 times more light absorption than current commercial solar cells and nine times more light than existing 3D solar cells.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, a whole generation of future scientists and engineers were inspired by a potent combination of fear of losing out to the Soviets, and of science fiction inspiring them to believe that they, too, could make a better future.

If we're really serious about transforming energy and transportation in this country, we're going to need tons of engineers to do the hard, technical work involved. Hitting the math and science books may be less fun in the short run than playing games and chatting online, but the percentage of young Americans doing the former rather than the latter may well determine whether the United States remains a leading source of technological innovation, or becomes an also-ran.

An Excellent Overview on Palin

The Corner points to an excellent overview of Sarah Palin's career in Alaska, placing in context how the various aspects of her life led her to this point, and what she has accomplished already.

Wasilla's population of 9,000 would be a small town in Britain, and even in most American states.

But Wasilla is the fifth-largest city in Alaska, which meant that Palin was an important player in state politics.

Her husband's status in the Yup'ik Eskimo tribe, of which he is a full, or "enrolled" member, connected her to another influential faction: the large and wealthy (because of their right to oil revenues) native tribes.

All of this gave her a base from which to launch her 2002 campaign for lieutenant (deputy) governor of Alaska.

She lost that, but collected a powerful enough following to be placated with a seat on, and subsequently the chairmanship of, the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, which launched her into the politics of Alaska's energy industry.

Palin quickly realised that Alaska had the potential to become a much bigger player in global energy politics, a conviction that grew as the price of oil rose. Alaska had been in hock to oil companies since major production began in the mid-1970s.

As with most poor, distant places that suddenly receive great natural-resource wealth, the first generation of politicians were mesmerised by the magnificence of the crumbs falling from the table. Palin was the first of the next generation to realise that Alaska should have a place at that table.

Her first target was an absurd bureaucratic tangle that for 30 years had kept the state from exporting its gas to the other 48 states. She set an agenda that centred on three mutually supportive objectives: cleaning up state politics, building a new gas pipeline, and increasing the state's share of energy revenues.

This agenda, pursued throughout Palin's commission tenure, culminated in her run for governor in 2006. By this time, she had already begun rooting out corruption and making enemies, but also establishing her bona fides as a reformer.

With this base, she surprised many by steamrollering first the Republican incumbent governor, and second, the Democratic former governor, in the election.

Far from being a reprise of Mr Smith Goes to Washington, Palin was a clear-eyed politician who, from the day she took office, knew exactly what she had to do and whose toes she would step on to do it.

The surprise is not that she has been in office for such a short time but that she has succeeded in each of her objectives. She has exposed corruption; given the state a bigger share in Alaska's energy wealth; and negotiated a deal involving big corporate players, the US and Canadian governments, Canadian provincial governments, and native tribes - the result of which was a £13 billion deal to launch the pipeline and increase the amount of domestic energy available to consumers. This deal makes the charge of having "no international experience" particularly absurd.

Read the whole thing, of course.

This puts a whole new perspective on things. It deepens her reform agenda, and McCain's, because it shows that Palin has really led nothing less than a revolution in the way things are done in Alaska. And an overwhelmingly successful and popular one, at that.

Palin helps McCain again in precisely inverting one of the common slams on the Bush Administration -- that they were the servants of Big Oil, through and through. Well, in Alaska, Palin made certain that Big Oil served the people of Alaska.

A similar thing has occurred, interestingly enough, in Iraq. Prior to our invasion, oil served to benefit only a small elite around Saddam. Now the oil wealth is widely dispersed, being given not only to Saddam's Sunni Arab base, but also to the Shi'ites and Kurds who actually live above Iraq's largest oil fields. But I digress.

McCain would do well to take his cues from this article and better articulate just how revolutionary Palin has been in Alaska, and that he and his running mate intend to do the very same in leading the United States, not merely with oil but in making sure all energy sources -- nuclear, solar, wind and geothermal -- are rapidly and efficiently put into service to the American people.

I think that would be yet another devastating blow to an Obama campaign which has no practical experience in these matters, and whose policy prescriptions, while admirable, are almost entirely in the realm of government subsidies and government-funded research.

More Good News About Solar

The more news I see along these lines, the happier I'll be:

“You could supply the entire US with the sun power here in a little piece of the Southwest,” says Dan Kabel as he strolls beneath a row of trough-shaped mirrors. Mr. Kabel is chief executive of Acciona Solar Power, which owns the $266 million Nevada Solar One project. “As fossil fuel costs rise, this plant is unaffected. “If America doesn’t do this, if we don’t install many more of these clean solar-power systems, we’ll just end up seeing a lot more fossil-fuel plants instead.”

Worth mentioning is the following:

Concentrating solar technology produces electricity for about 17 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh), Mehos estimates. But subsidies remain critical to solar thermal development in both the US and Spain, two global hotbeds of CSP development. With the federal investment tax credit, or ITC, costs drop to about 15 cents per kWh – low enough to compete with natural gas.

More solar, more wind, more nuclear, says I! Obama is two-for-three on the above (he waffles on nuclear), and McCain three-for-three thankfully.

Wind Energy in Upstate New York

I just read two very interesting articles at the NY Times and Yahoo on wind energy in upstate New York.

One thing that jumped out at me in the Yahoo article was how it was the younger generation that was opposed to the installation of the wind turbines, while their literal parents were the ones embracing this new technology in the hopes of building a better economic future for their poor rural communities. In Tom Friedman's lexicon of the "Lexus and the Olive Tree," then, the young embraced the traditional olive tree while their elders embraced the futuristic Lexus. Quite the role-reversal!

The NY Times article focused more on the corrupting influence of Big Wind, showing that even green companies can be as wicked as traditional energy companies. Heh.

Thomas Friedman, somewhat off-target

Thomas Friedman argues here that the U.S. should follow Denmark's good example in conserving energy and changing transportation patterns.

Specifically, he says:

* Denmark has used its taxes on gasoline to wean itself off foreign oil.

* It has also used building and efficiency standards to that end.

* Lastly, it has aggressively expanded wind energy, not only domestically, but exporting such technology at a rate four times faster than the rest of its exports.

The only problem I have with any of the above is that Friedman gives far too little emphasis to the fact that Denmark has only 5 million or so people, and that they are drilling offshore in the North Sea. He mentions that its a small country with North Sea oil, but it's a one-line throwaway.

So I looked up Copenhagen's population on Wikipedia, and Copenhagen turns out to contain 1,835,371 people, or 33.5% of Denmark's total! So of course when your main city has a third of the country's population, you can have advantages in transit efficiency that much bigger countries cannot avail themselves of.

Friedman is dead on about the need for greater energy efficiency in this country. But when he advocates for $10/gallon gas as Denmark has, or using bicycles more to commute in-city as he claims 50% of Copenhagen's residents do, he's ignoring the obvious fact that not every aspect of Denmark's model is going to work here in this vast, sprawling country of ours.

Good News / Bad News

In the good news dept. for fighting global warming, apparently China is rapidly ramping up various green energy technologies.

This is very good news from the standpoint of slowing down the rate of growth of future CO2 emissions, since China and India are the fastest growing sources of CO2 emissions, and China has recently passed the U.S. as the number one source of said emissions.

The bad news aspect is that China is getting more serious about this, perhaps, than the U.S. is! I hope this ends up spurring us even harder to push for nuclear, solar and wind energy generation.

Thomas Barnett Teaches Me Something New (again)

As per Thomas P.M. Barnett, the U.S. is actually the #1 source of its own oil, with NAFTA partners Canada and Mexico comprising the #2 slot, then Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and Europe (including the former Soviet Union) rounding out slots 3 through 6. Who knew? The Middle East, second to last in supplying oil to the United States!

This proves again Barnett's point that he's been making for a long while now -- that the war in Iraq has NOT been about stealing oil for the United States -- rather, we've been securing the oil that will be primarily going to other, Asian destinations by destroying the corrupt and murderous Saddam family chokehold on it, and replacing it with a far more transparent, less corrupt democratic government in Iraq. Better for the people of Iraq, definitely, and better for the world.

The thanks for our efforts have, of course, been overwhelming.

This Could be Big

Since we're on a green tech roll here, here's excellent news from MIT about a possible electrolysis technique that will allow for 24/7 solar power.

If the follow-through tests on this new technique work out, this could make solar a much bigger and more cost-effective player in competing with nuclear power as an excellent alternative to traditional CO2-emitting energy sources!

To that end, I am trying to find a good apples-to-apples comparison of costs per megawatt hour for nuclear vs. coal vs. solar vs. wind. If any of my massive readership could tease out a good source of that information, I'd be eternally grateful.

Green Energy?

I read a very interesting article recently in the German magazine Der Spiegel about Germany's struggle with what kind of energy generation to pursue going forward.

It included this stunning quote: "A typical coal-fired power plant (burning lignite) emits up to 1,150 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour of electricity produced. The most modern gas-driven facilities emit 400 grams for the same amount of electricity. And for nuclear power plants? That number is around 30 grams per kilowatt hour when the entire life-cycle of the plant is taken into account."

Read that again. It's astonishing. And it leaves you really no choice as to what to choose if you're serious about preventing CO2 emissions -- it's nuclear power, in a walk, over coal- or natural gas-powered plants.

Now, yes of course there's solar, there's wind, there's geothermal, but even in Germany which has pursued them far more fervently than we have here, those combined only add up to some 14% of their total energy generation, compared to not even 1% here.

Listen, I love solar power, I'd love to see it pursued aggressively here. But starting at such a low base it's going to take a while to be a really significant part of the energy picture. We have to admit that the practical effect of banning new nuclear power plants in this country has not led to more "green energy" -- what it has led to is more CO2-emitting coal- and natural gas-powered plants being built instead.

If this is a green victory, I don't think we can afford many more.