From http://nuclearromance.wordpress.com/2011/08/31/quake-raises-red-flags-for-indian-point-nukes/Introduction
As you may have heard, there is a big fracking controversy in NY State, and especially in the rural regions that stand in the cross hairs of it. However, it turns out, at core, this is another example of squeezing the hydrocarbon dregs out of North America. Since NY has essentially no oil and natural gas resources still left to tap, the Marcellus and Utica tight shale gas resource are it as far as commercializable hydrocarbon mining goes in NY.
Natural gas (Ngas) is used in NY to make electricity (about 1/3 of Ngas consumed in the state), heat houses (about 1/3) and the remainder is used for commercial and industrial heating. All of that electricity made by Ngas in NY (about 6 GW) could be replaced with non-polluting sourced electricity, and the lowest cost way to do this would be using wind turbines along with a few additional pumped hydroelectric energy storage units (NY has two of those, one in Niagara Falls and one in southeast NY State at Blenheim-Gilboa State Park). In the process of evolving from this depletable, air polluting (the CO2 combustion by-product, "fugitive" methane emissions) fossil fuel electrical energy source, a lot of jobs could be created and maintained in NY, though it might raise the price of electricity a bit (but not out of the realms of affordability, however). To make an average of 6 GW of electricity, about 18 GW of wind turbine capacity would be needed, and at about $2.5 billion per GW of capacity these days, that's a long term investment of about $45 billion investment, and 720,000 job-years of direct employment. If you or your friends, neighbors and relatives need a job, well, that's one way to do it. Add in the jobs created by creating those wealth producing manufacturing jobs, and UB 2020 just looks like amateur hour, assuming there is even any net job creation even before all the various governmental subsidies and "prop-ups" are considered/factored into the equation.
In fact, from a marketing perspective, the only way to increase the Ngas price significantly these days is to increase the consumption of it slightly (Ngas is a price inelastic commodity). Correspondingly, the best way to keep the price low is to steadily decrease the consumption of Ngas.
But now, along comes the Indian Point nuke complex (2 operating out of the 3 nukes that have been installed there). Indian Point 2 is up for operating license renewal in 2013, and IP 3 is up for relisencing in 2015. If they do not get re-licensed (and the renewal is strongly opposed by both Governor Cuomo and Attorney General Schniederman and much of the public), some means of coming up with close to 2 GW of electricity for NY City and its northern burbs will be needed. Enter Ngas, and in particular, NY State sourced fracking derived Ngas, lots of politics, lots of intrigue, the Entergy Corporation (who owns these two major nuke cash cows) and the recent and still not crammed down the memory hole Fukushima FUBAR. Mix well, and then prepare for a a major rumble!
After all, that's a nice big new market for Ngas. Or, that's a lot of jobs making wind turbines, pumped hydro "batteries" and improvements to our existing high capacity transmission lines. And just because the latter option is more job creating (especially working class jobs), more environmentally logical/desirable, well, this is NY, and those options don't carry much weight. Right?
Discussion
In the summer of 2008, natural gas (Ngas) prices were going for over $13/MBtu on the spot market (Henry Hub - see chart at http://www.neo.ne.gov/statshtml/124.htm), but these soon crashed, partly as a result of the Great Recession reducing demand by a few percent and partly due to foolish bets made by the likes of Aubrey McClendon (CEO of Chesapeake Energy, a natural gas exploration and production (E & P) company and prime fracking advocate/pusher), who lost $2.3 billion when Morgan Stanley called in a bet he was stupid enough to make regarding gas futures contracts with them (by and large, the operator of a casino, on average, always comes up ahead, and in this case, that would be Morgan Stanley). For 2008, Ngas averaged close to $10/MBtu, so national Ngas bulk sales were close to $230 billion. By 2010, bulk prices were still in the pits (and still are), averaging below $4/MBtu, so sales were close to $92 billion/yr. In general, the cost to get Ngas out of the ground where fracking tight shales was the means to do this was greater than the price that could be obtained for this Ngas. Oops. Most frackers subsisted and continue to exist on the higher prices they had locked in via the futures market, but that jackpot only lasts for so long (most gas futures contracts are only a few years long). Or they went the "asset sales route", hoping to get bought out by cash-bloated major oil companies whose stock price is unrelated to their cash stockpile but is related to proven hydrocarbon reserves, and who are having a hard time coming up with new hydrocarbon reserves.
So how to boost Ngas consumption enough to re-establish the thermal equality with oil prices that had been the norm until the late 2000's (Ngas would need to be $18/MBtu to match crude oil at $100/bbl and 5.6 MBtu/bbl of crude oil)? Running cars and trucks on compressed natural gas (CNG) is going at a snails pace, much to the dismay of characters like T.B. Pickens (also called T. Boone, but T.B. may be a better analogy of his societal usefulness). Converting methane to gasoline and diesel (GTL plants, see http://wagengineering.blogspot.com/2010/11/marcellus-gas-pipe-dreams-or-wind.html) can be done, but at close to $18 to $25 billion per world scale facility, well, that's not in the cards when there seems to be a de-facto capital strike by corporate types against president Obama. And those darned wind turbines now make about 3% of the electricity in the US (44 GW capacity, 13 GW delivered), and displace over 4% of all the Ngas consumed in the US - that's the OPPOSITE of increasing Ngas consumption! As for shutting down coal burners and replacing them with Ngas, well, coal makes for cheaper electricity, especially from old plants. Also an "oops", even at presently depressed Ngas prices.
Besides, nobody trusts Ngas prices - since 2000 there have been 4 significant price spikes, starting with the Enron crimewave in California. About the only thing trustworthy about Ngas prices is that there is no stable long term price that can be accurately used. After all, both political and weather disasters can affect Ngas production, and slight mis-matches between supply and demand have drastic effects on Ngas prices. And then there is all that wonderful speculation activity, and the betting on bets on Ngas prices that can be done and which can dwarf the money spent on buying actually delivered product. A lot of such activity does not mesh well with those who make electricity, where most production plants last over 20 years, and in the case of the Huntley coal burner in Tonawanda, over 75 years (with occasional improvements).
And so, the question of how to replace the 2 GW of Indian Point electricity - with Ngas, with wind turbines and tidal energy systems - or whether to replace it (by extending the original 40 year operating licenses by another 20 years) is one fraught with economic, political, financial speculation, job creation or no job creation as well as societal safety and environmental ramifications. For example, if you want to minimize job creation potentials for middle class people, then keeping those plants going or else replacing them with Ngas sourced electricity would be the best way to achieve that wish-fulfillment. On the other hand, if you want to maximize job creation without pushing electricity prices so high as to cause a lot of economic misery, wind and tidal would be the way to go (requiring around $15 to $20 billion of investment/job creation). Or, you could maximize job creation by producing 2 GW delivered via solar PV (requires at least 20 GW PV capacity plus about 4 GW new pumped hydro capacity and huge storage capability and an investment/job creation expenditure north of $100 billion). Of course, that solar PV would be in the 40 to 50 c/kw-hr range, which is over 10 times the present generation price for electricity in that part of the state...).
This topic of using the replacement of the "IP Twins" is explored in further detail in a paper that was written for the benefit of the local Sierra Club (who are not fans of either new Ngas fracking in NY State or of continued operation of the IP Twins). They like renewable energy approaches to job creation and environmentally sensible electricity production (the Apollo Alliance/Blue-Green Alliance are joint efforts by the United Steelworkers and the Sierra Club). Anyway, this paper is not their official policy - just written to them as a way of sounding out some ideas.
There is just no way that the IP Twins are "safe". So far we have been lucky, but, as Clint Eastwood famously said, "Feeling lucky, punk?" They are an accident waiting to happen, and if it does happen, effectively the finances of NY State are toast. An "oops" event at one or both would render most of the wealth of NY as useless when mass radioisotopic poisoning of the majority of the population of NY and more importantly, the vast majority of the wealthy (and millions of not so wealthy) real estate in the state occurs. And there is just no accurate way to ascertain the risks (= probability of an event times the severity of that and subsequent spin-off events) of a nuke incident - you can't use Gausian ("bell-curve") statistics for "black swan" events. And then there are the humongous subsidies associated with no final disposal method of spent fuel rods ("swimming pools" don't cut it) and the Price-Anderson Act, which makes nukes possible in this counrty. The P-A Act essentially puts the Federal Government on the hook for disasters above the $10 billion mark, and an "oops" at Indian Point would likely push past $1 trillion with little effort.
Of course, there are four more nukes in NY State that also need to be shut down ASAP - all located in the SE part of the Lake Ontario coast, (Rochester-Syracuse- Oswego). And then don't forget the 12 on the Ontario side of Lake Ontario (10 active and two dormant). After all, prevailing winds tend to go from west to east, especially in the winter, when lots of Syracuse to NYC and Syracuse to Boston winds set up. It's just that there are well over 15 million people within 50 miles of the IP twins, and the money obtained from taxes down there tends to support us in WNY, so that's sort of like threatening the goose that lays those golden eggs with a sawed-off shotgun and/or an RPG. Not wise at all..
Anyway, a copy of the paper (with references and lost of numbers) can be found here:
http://www.4shared.com/document/d-fbvXsg/bwag080911b.html. Got any opinion on this matter? Maybe all we have to lose in WNY is a lot of unemployment, and we could gain employment if those nasty twins are replaced in a cost effective manner with a job-creating approach.
BTW, for those who scoff at whether this is possible, check out this article:
http://www.renewableenergyfocus.com/view/16406/comment-north-german-state-doubles-onshore-wind-energy/. While there may not be much of a way to change some peoples minds, perhaps others may not be immune to facts and logic... Of course, what might have to change is the pricing system for renewable energy in NY State - see this article as to why that might be/as to what actually works: http://energyselfreliantstates.org/content/what-renewable-energy-policy-works-best-feed-tariffs.
DB
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment