Guest Post: Nuclear Reactors are Key to Sustainable Energy

Dennis Higgins passes on his commentaries associated with New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (Climate Act).  I asked his permission to present his analysis of the New York State energy legislation associated with the budget.  This commentary was published in the Oneonta Star.

Dennis taught for just a few years at St Lawrence and Scranton University, but spent most of my career at SUNY Oneonta, teaching Mathematics and Computer Science.  He retired early, several years ago, in order to devote more time to home-schooling his four daughters. (Three will be in college next year and the youngest opted to go to the local public school, so his home schooling is ending this June.) Dennis and his wife run a farm with large vegetable gardens.  They keep horses and raise chickens, goats, and beef.  He has been involved in environmental and energy issues for a decade or more. Although he did work extensively with the ‘Big Greens’ in efforts to stop gas infrastructure, his views on what needs to happen, and his  opinions of Big Green advocacy, have served to separate them.

Nuclear reactors are key to sustainable energy

This year’s late state budget has already been soundly criticized by regional legislators (covered in this paper — “Area reps are critical of state budget,” May 3). Most surprising, though, was that Assembly and Senate criticisms overlooked the biggest blunders in the budget’s small print: Albany has dug its heels in on a bizarre slogan-driven energy plan.

Andrew Cuomo’s last budget instituted accelerated siting of industrial solar and wind projects, enabling the state to ignore both local ordinances and thorough environmental review. Gov. Kathy Hochul’s budget continues the assault. To speed the bulldozing of farmland and forest, to silence recalcitrant communities, the budget obviated court action by upstate towns against Albany.

The legislature approved and back-dated an appraisal process that robs rural municipalities of fair tax revenue from the sprawling renewable buildout forced upon them. The governor’s budget includes a “Build Public Renewables” component, instructing the New York Power Authority to join the attack on home rule, private property and the environment. Because NYPA is a government entity, it would pay no taxes at all. Using eminent domain, NYPA can seize your property for the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of miles of transmission lines the state’s energy plan will need.

German renewable assets comprise a third of its energy capacity but they have not enabled it to decarbonize. Germany relies on biomass and fossil-fuels, including coal, for half of its electricity. On paper, 30% of California’s capacity is in intermittent resources, but California continues to burn about as much fossil fuel as ever. California imports 30% of its energy from neighbor states, much of it coal-generated. California customers pay near double the U.S. average per kilowatt-hour. Germany’s energy costs are twice those of its neighbor, France. Germany and California have invested decades and billions of dollars in order to show us how to fail calamitously if we follow a nonsensical plan — pretty simple lessons which Albany can’t seem to digest: renewable buildout fails to lower prices, cut fossil-fuel use or ensure reliability.

New York remains determined to forfeit farmland and forest to sprawling solar arrays and gigantic turbines which, mostly, generate nothing. Last year’s wind capacity factor in the state was 22%, so the proposed 10 gigawatts of onshore wind would, on average, generate just over 2 GW. But it could still gobble up a thousand square miles. New York’s solar capacity factor is not much better than Alaska’s. The 60 GW or more of solar the plan projects will generate, on average, about 7 GW, but will require 500 square miles. The state’s energy research and development authority, NYSERDA, suggests that by 2050, New York’s grid might need just 6.8 GW of 8-hour storage. In 27 years, that won’t power New York City for three hours.

Unfortunately, a reliable affordable grid can’t be designed using press releases and Big Green talking points as blueprints. No one applauding the plan seems to have taken the semester of physics or engineering needed to learn that there is a difference between power and energy.

Power is the maximal amount a resource can generate in optimal conditions, instantaneously. But the energy needed to meet demand any time anywhere depends on how many hours those solar panels, wind turbines, hydro or nuclear or gas power plants can keep generating at or near capacity.

Here is a quick lesson: A 2,100 MW nuclear plant such as Indian Point could generate 47,000 megawatt-hours of energy in a day; fully a quarter of what was needed to keep lights, elevators, heat, AC and everything else in New York City running smoothly. Although a 2,100 MW solar farm might reach full capacity for a minute or two at noon during mid-summer, it will generate, on average, only 6,000 MWh daily, possibly none of that when you need it. The nuclear power plant needed 240 acres and supported a thousand skilled workers. The solar farm might need sixty times as much land — about 15,000 acres — and have five permanent employees.

Imagine covering an area the size of Albany or Binghamton in Chinese-made glass panels every single year until 2050, and then discovering that we are still burning as much gas as ever. Backup power for intermittent resources must ramp up faster than combined-cycle gas plants. Lots of simple cycle plants — only half as efficient as combined-cycle — are needed. In fact, the state’s plan requires as much backup capacity as all our current fossil-fuel plants can deliver. The plan triples the state’s required energy imports and exports, so the grid looks reliable on scrap paper.

Albany hopes there will be eager buyers for any renewable energy we can’t use on summer days, and willing sellers for the energy we need all the rest of the time. The grid operator, NYISO, is already projecting an insufficient capacity margin for the metro region. Think for a minute about the expensive, dangerous experiment Albany is undertaking. What happened in Texas when energy failed? People died. How would New York City fare for a week in January with no electricity?

Albany is like an ostrich, head in the sand, refusing to acknowledge that there is a better way. A nuclear power plant can run day and night, generating baseload energy at 90% of capacity. While solar and wind need replacement in two decades, nuclear plants can be licensed for 80 years. According to the UN Economic Commission, “there is no science-based evidence that nuclear energy does more harm to human health or to the environment than other electricity production technologies.” Indeed, nuclear has the lowest life cycle environmental impact of any generating source. Further, the UNECE report determined that the “maximum consequences of a single [severe accident] are … still comparable with other electricity production technologies.”

Sweden and France demonstrated in the late 1970s and ’80s that decarbonizing with nuclear power could be done in about 10 years. For less money, much less land, generating hundreds of times more permanent jobs than the state’s plan, we could have reliable affordable carbon-free energy, by replacing our fossil-fuel fleet with next-generation nuclear reactors.

Comment

I think Higgins did a great job summarizing the nonsense in the “bizarre slogan-driven energy plan”.  The distinction between power and energy that he defines is a critical consideration.  Building power capacity is easy but providing energy when it is needed most is a challenge that proponents of the proposed Climate Act net-zero transition plan do not acknowledge adequately even if they understand.  Combined with an insistence that zero is the only acceptable level of pollution the plan is unrealistic for all the reasons he describes and will have many unrecognized impacts that will do more harm than good.  I agree that nuclear generation should be a feature of the future energy system.