Category Archives: Web Article Review

more on the downward spiral of nuclear power economics

This one is from Five Thirty Eight:

The age of the nuclear fleet is partly to blame. That’s not because America’s nuclear reactors are falling apart — they’re regularly inspected, and almost all of them have now gone through the process of renewing their original 40-year operating licenses for 20 more years…

Instead, it’s the cost of upkeep that’s prohibitive. Things do fall apart — especially things exposed to radiation on a daily basis. Maintenance and repair, upgrades and rejuvenation all take a lot of capital investment. And right now, that means spending lots of money on power plants that aren’t especially profitable. Historically, nuclear power plants were expensive to build but could produce electricity more cheaply than fossil fuels, making them a favored source of low-cost electricity. That changed with the fracking boom, Morgan told me. “Natural gas from fracking has gotten so cheap, [nuclear plants] aren’t as high up in the dispatch stack,” he said, referring to the order of resources utilities choose to buy electricity from. “So many of them are now not very attractive economically…”

Morgan and other researchers are studying the economic feasibility of investment in newer kinds of nuclear power plants — including different ways of designing the mechanical systems of a reactor and building reactors that are smaller and could be put together on an assembly line. Currently, reactors must be custom-built to each site. Their research showed that new designs are unlikely to be commercially viable in time to seriously address climate change. And in a new study that has not yet been published, they found that the domestic U.S. market for nuclear power isn’t robust enough to justify the investments necessary to build a modular reactor industry.

Three Mile Island

A lot of people probably don’t realize that 2 of the 4 reactors at Three Mile Island have been operational without issues since the 1970s. They are projected to be shut down next year.

Across the U.S., more communities are grappling with such questions, as the owners of nuclear plants dating back to the 1960s and ’70s begin to put their facilities into premature retirement. That’s because the plants are having trouble staying competitive in an era of cheap natural gas, a product of the shale boom. Also, nuclear power’s attraction as a clean energy source has been eclipsed by no-emissions alternatives such as wind and solar power.

One enemy of the nuclear industry in Pennsylvania is natural gas lobbyists.

Even so, nuclear advocates have thus far had better success mobilizing resources at the state level. In Illinois, the state that leads the U.S. in nuclear power generation, lawmakers passed controversial legislation in 2016 to subsidize nuclear plants with so-called zero-emission credits. Exelon, which operates the largest nuclear fleet in the nation, owns the state’s six operational sites.

States including New York and New Jersey have enacted similar policies. Pennsylvania has been a tougher sell. A nuclear energy caucus in the state legislature has failed to pass anything helpful yet. Its efforts have been stymied, in part, by forces supporting the state’s booming natural gas industry.

 

stranded fossil fuel assets

An article from Cambridge (University, not Analytica) in Nature Climate Change estimates potential losses if renewables were to lead to a sudden drop in demand for fossil fuels.

Our analysis suggests that part of the SFFA would occur as a result of an already ongoing technological trajectory, irrespective of whether or not new climate policies are adopted; the loss would be amplified if new climate policies to reach the 2 °C target of the Paris Agreement are adopted and/or if low-cost producers (some OPEC countries) maintain their level of production (‘sell out’) despite declining demand; the magnitude of the loss from SFFA may amount to a discounted global wealth loss of US$1–4 trillion; and there are clear distributional impacts, with winners (for example, net importers such as China or the EU) and losers (for example, Russia, the United States or Canada, which could see their fossil fuel industries nearly shut down), although the two effects would largely offset each other at the level of aggregate global GDP.

So coal subsidies might be “making America Great Again”, but not for long. And they might not even have the desired effect according to this article, which argues they would primarily benefit nuclear. And solar energy, it turns out, is a growth industry creating jobs in many Republican districts.

 

top 20 metros for venture capital

This post has an interesting list of the top 20 metro areas in the world for venture capital investment. San Francisco and San Jose together vacuum up about 25%. Add LA and San Diego, and California gets over 30%. Boston and New York add up to a respectable 12%. After that it drops off quickly, with the major global cities tending to grab 1-2% or so. Austin does a great job marketing itself, but only adds up to 1.5%. Big cities in China and India are only grabbing in the 1% range, but presumably the money may go farther there. My home city of Philadelphia grabs around 1% which seems underwhelming, but at least we crack the list when there are a plenty of major cities (Miami, Atalnta, Houston, Rome, anywhere in Europe outside London and Paris, the entire continents of South America and Africa?) that do not.

the numbers on Syria

Syria might not be grabbing the U.S. headlines right now, but the conflict is grinding on. The Week has some staggering numbers. Out of a population of about 20 million, 5.6 million are refugees inside the country and 6.2 million have left the country as refugees. That’s 60% of the population. Estimates of the death toll vary but the most widely accepted is around half a million. That’s 2-3% of the population.

hottest May recorded in U.S. was during the Dust Bowl, until last month

May 2018 broke a heat record last set during the 1930s Dust Bowl. I’m trying to think of some clever Grapes of Wrath reference to illustrate how clever and well-read I am. Nothing is coming. Well, let’s just point out that last time it was this hot, a segment of the U.S. population was living in poverty as a result.

China passes U.S. in healthy life expectancy

  1. U.S. citizens still live a bit longer than Chinese citizens on average, but Chinese citizens have drawn even and slightly surpassed us in health.

https://www.axios.com/chinese-people-now-healthy-longer-than-americans-6dc7235f-e057-45ee-a975-c433611edabf.html

This would be perfectly fine if it just represented China catching up, but I suspect it represents the U.S. stalling as both our peers and developing countries continue to progress.

Vicar of Bray

Michael Liebreich at Bloomberg New Energy Finance describes renewable energy investments some oil and gas companies are making, which he calls the “Vicar of Bray”. I don’t quite get the reason for that name.

Under the first strategy – which we could call the Vicar of Bray  – oil and gas companies attempt to maintain leadership of the commanding heights of the energy industry as it shifts away from fossil fuels to clean energy, through a perfectly-timed and elegantly-executed redirection of capital and human capacity.

Early attempts at the Vicar of Bray include BP’s famous “Beyond Petroleum” rebranding under Lord Browne in 2000 – which was followed by the investment of $8 billion in clean energy, some of which was later written off. Similarly, Shell tried to gain a leadership position in the nascent solar sector by buying Siemens Solar in 2002; six years later it sold the sub-scale and failing operation. David Crane, former CEO of NRG, famously failed in his attempt to turn it into a clean energy company.

Today, it looks like all the major European oil companies are planning on some variant of Vicar of Bray. Shell (disclosure: whose New Energies Advisory Board I recently joined) has announced its intention to invest $2 billion per year in its New Energies division until 2020, out of its total capital spending of $25-30 billion; BP is investing a more modest $0.5 billion out of its $15 billion capex budget. French oil giant Total has committed to 20 percent low-carbon businesses within 20 years (although this includes mid-stream and down-stream gas). Statoil has been investing in floating offshore wind as well as carbon capture and sequestration, and this year announced its relaunch as Equinor, removing “oil” from its name, if not from its cash flows.

MIT makes crazy AI on purpose

A group at MIT showed an AI algorithm really disturbing pictures and then asked it what it saw in some inkblots.

When a “normal” algorithm generated by artificial intelligence is asked what it sees in an abstract shape it chooses something cheery: “A group of birds sitting on top of a tree branch.”

Norman sees a man being electrocuted.

And where “normal” AI sees a couple of people standing next to each other, Norman sees a man jumping from a window.

The psychopathic algorithm was created by a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as part of an experiment to see what training AI on data from “the dark corners of the net” would do to its world view.

The software was shown images of people dying in gruesome circumstances, culled from a group on the website Reddit.

Then the AI, which can interpret pictures and describe what it sees in text form, was shown inkblot drawings and asked what it saw in them.

Personally, I’m afraid of the people who spend their time seeking out photos of people dying violently and posting them on Reddit. As for the algorithm, I suppose it could be trained to identify and block violent images like the ones it has been shown, or kiddie porn, or ads targeting minors, etc. Or in the wrong hands, it could be used to block political speech or repress certain people or groups. Or the highest bidding company could get to use it to repress competitors’ ads.