All Pathways to 1.5°C Limit Include Nuclear

Hoesung Lee, Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), delivered an address on the opening day of the International Conference on Climate Change and the Role of Nuclear Power, held in Vienna in the second week of October. 2019. He will review the findings of the report released a year ago by the IPCC, which featured four model pathways for limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, the threshold at which most experts believe the worst impacts from climate change can still be avoided. All four model pathways included increases in nuclear power generation by 2050, ranging between 59% and 501%.

To support the low-carbon energy transformation needed to achieve climate change goals, the conference focused on opportunities and challenges for nuclear power development. To this end, organizers brought together representatives of low-carbon energy sectors, international organizations and national experts.

IAEA Acting Director General Cornel Feruta opened the conference. Other prominent speakers included Liu Zhenmin, Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs at the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs; William D. Magwood, IV, Director-General of the NEA ; Fatih Birol, Executive Director of the International Energy Agency; LI Yong, Director General of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization; and senior officials and scientists from 75 countries including Argentina, China, Egypt, France, India, Mongolia, Morocco, the Russian Federation and the United States of America.

“Nuclear power has long made a major contribution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and currently produces one-third of the world’s low carbon electricity while also supporting sustainable development and fulfilling growing energy demands,” said IAEA Deputy Director General Mikhail Chudakov, Head of the Department of Nuclear Energy. “We are honoured that Dr. Hoesung Lee, one of the world’s leading scientific voices on climate change, is bringing his expertise to this first-of-a-kind conference.”

Read more at the International Atomic Energy Agency, "IPCC Head to Speak at International Conference on Climate Change and the Role of Nuclear Power," by Jeffrey Donovan, August 29, 2019.

Published by Nucleation Capital in 100% Renewables, Advanced Nuclear, Carbon emissions, Climate change, Climate policy, Environmental support for nuclear, Future of Energy, History Timeline, LINKS, Politicians supporting nuclear, Scientific debate, Solving climate

May 6, 2019

Ocasio-Cortez’ Green New Deal Leaves the Door Open to Nuclear

Green New Deal sponsor Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez still has an “open mind” on nuclear energy. “I don’t take a strong anti- or pro-position on it,” the New York Democrat said about nuclear energy in an interview in mid-2019.

While Ocasio-Cortez has an "open mind" on nuclear energy, she differentiates between the decades-old plants in the United States and more advanced technologies under development. Her Green New Deal resolution, which calls for “clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy” to meet 100 percent of U.S. power needs in the next 10 years, “leaves the door open on nuclear so that we can have that conversation,” she said.

Ocasio-Cortez, alongside many other progressive lawmakers and environmental groups, is pushing for an expedited U.S. energy transition, showed that she retains an open mind towards getting answers to the typically controversial questions over whether the technology will improve and whether the markets would adopt future generations of nuclear power.

Passing the Green New Deal resolution, she said, “is what will allow us to have these substantive conversations.”

Read more at Morning Consult, "Ocasio-Cortez: Green New Deal ‘Leaves the Door Open’ on Nuclear."

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November 7, 2017

Wind and Solar Power Advance, but Carbon Refuses to Retreat

The world’s carbon intensity of energy, namely the amount of CO₂ spewed into the air for each unit of energy consumed, has not budged much since Kyoto was held, 20 years ago. Even among the highly industrialized nations in the OECD, the carbon intensity of energy has declined by a paltry 4% since then, according to the International Energy Agency. This statistic, alone, puts a big question mark over the 100% renewable strategies deployed around the world to replace fossil energy. In a nutshell: Perhaps 100% renewables are not the answer.

Eduardo Porter isn't taking his eye off the ball, the way many reporters are, in gushing over the growth of wind and solar around the world. Instead, he takes a hard look at the carbon-intensity of energy, which we think is the key metric to assess for our progress in addressing climate change, along with the parts per million of CO2 that are interfering with our atmosphere.

Although the world emerged from Kyoto, Japan, with what was billed as the first-ever deal to limit emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases, we have not made a lot of progress reducing the carbon-intensity of energy since then. All but one of the world’s nations — the United States, thanks to then President Bush — committed to making concrete commitments to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels. But now, twenty years later, emissions have kept rising, along with the carbon-intensity of energy, despite the fact that the price of wind turbines and solar panels has plummeted.

"Over the past 10 years, governments and private investors have collectively spent $2 trillion on infrastructure to draw electricity from the wind and the sun, according to estimates by Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Environmental Progress, a nonprofit that advocates nuclear power as an essential tool in the battle against climate change, says that exceeds the total cost of all nuclear plants built to date or under construction, adjusted for inflation.

Capacity from renewable sources has grown by leaps and bounds, outpacing growth from all other sources — including coal, natural gas and nuclear power — in recent years. Solar and wind capacity installed in 2015 was more than 10 times what the International Energy Agency had forecast a decade before."

By The New York Times | Source: Environmental Progress with data from BP’s “Statistical Review of World Energy”

Read more of this analysis by Eduardo Porter at the New York Times: "Wind and Solar power Advance, but Carbon Refuses to Retreat."

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June 20, 2017

Fisticuffs Over the Route to a Clean-Energy Future

Democrats in the United States Senate and in the California Assembly have proposed legislation calling for a full transition to renewable energy. In doing so, they are relying on scholarly analysis by a prominent Stanford University professor, Mark Z. Jacobson, who published a paper in 2015 asserting that it would be feasible to power the American economy by midcentury almost entirely with energy from the wind, the sun and water, cheaper than fossil fuels. Then a group of 21 prominent scholars, including physicists and engineers, climate scientists and sociologists, dismantled the Jacobson paper and its conclusions bit by bit, in a long-awaited study published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences — the same journal in which Professor Jacobson’s manifesto appeared.

Read more of this analysis by Eduardo Porter at the New York Times: "Fisticuffs Over the Route to a Clean-Energy Future."

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November 18, 2014

What it takes to reverse climate change

Ross Koningstein and David Fork, armed with the resources of Google, Inc., set out in an effort that was known as "RE<C" to assess and support the development of renewable energy sources so that they could generate reliable electricity more cheaply than coal. In an subsequent article penned in the IEEE Spectrum entitled What It Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change: Today's renewable energy technologies won't save us. So what will?, we learn the results of their years of work.

Initially, Google announced that it would help promising technologies mature by investing in start-ups and even engaging in internal R&D. Its goal: to produce a gigawatt of renewable power more cheaply than could a coal-fired plant within a few years, not decades. Unfortunately, within a few years, Google shut down the initiative, when it became clear that exclusively using renewables would not work. Koningstein and Fork then turned their attention to examining the the underlying assumptions and learning from their experience.

Even though there were a few sparse areas that might manage to achieve higher renewables penetration and approach the goal, it was clear that most regions of the world would not be able to power their needs with renewables, if looked at on a time-coincident basis. They determined that the only way to both stop new emissions and reverse the warming trends that had been put into motion by CO2 accumulations was through "radical technological advances in cheap zero-carbon energy, as well as a method of extracting CO2 from the atmosphere and sequestering the carbon."

Ross Koningstein serves as an advisor to Nucleation Capital and we have discussed and benefitted in many ways from his vast experience. Read Ross' own published report at "What It Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change: Today’s renewable energy technologies won’t save us. So what will?."

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