On Politifact, President Clinton and Nuclear Costs

You may recall that in November, President Clinton made the following statement about the relative costs of nuclear, solar and wind in an appearance on The Daily Show:

"Solar energy and wind energy ... would already be competitive with coal if you had to pay the extraneous costs of coal -- the health care costs and other things. And ... wind within two years and solar within five will be competitive in price with coal. They're both cheaper than nuclear right now."

In response, Lou Jacobson, a reporter with Politifact, took a closer look at Clinton's claim, and rated it half-true:

Clinton was correct about wind energy being "cheaper than nuclear right now," at least the onshore kind. But for now, nuclear beats the cheapest form of solar energy on price. So we rate his statement Half True.

That claim didn't sit well with NEI's David Bradish, who pulled apart the numbers and suggested that Politifact change its rating from "half true" to "mostly false":

As shown above, the low end of nuclear’s cost range ($109.70/MWh) is lower than the high end of wind’s cost range ($115/MWh); therefore wind is not always cheaper than nuclear.

Further, the amount of wind that can be built is limited to specific places in the U.S. that receive adequate wind flow (see map below).

A substantial amount of wind cannot be built in places such as the Southeast due to a lack of natural resources. Areas with low wind resources will produce less electricity from installed turbines which in turn cause higher levelized costs.

[...]

Currently, 104 nuclear reactors (101 gigawatts) generate 20% of the country’s baseload power at low operating costs. This compares to 40 GW of wind and 1 GW of solar generating 2.2% and 0.0003% of the country’s electricity, respectively, at intermittent times.

The folks at PolitiFact should reconsider their conclusion about former President Clinton’s statements and change it from Half True to Mostly False.

Back on November 22, I passed David's analysis along to Jacobson, and here's the response I got:

I apologize for not getting back sooner. I was gone for most of last week and now we're on a short week.

We are expecting to do a full Mailbag treatment on this topic, probably next week, since we have received many comments on the story. We are happy to run your comments (likely abridged for space) in that piece. We usually do not run names with the comments in our mailbag items, but your case would likely be an exception, assuming you'd like to be identified.

I will say that our comments have included many examples of complaints that we were too soft on nuclear (and too hard on renewables) and many that we were too hard on nuclear (and too soft on renewables). Given the complexity of analyzing this issue -- both nuclear and renewables have complaints about how they were treated by the DOE methodology -- I do not see an obvious reason for us to change our rating from the fairly neutral Half True. But that's not my call--the editors determine the rating, and the writers only make recommendations.

Thanks for writing....

Lou Jacobson

Well, it's now December 8, and I have yet to see an update to the original piece. I checked in with Jacobson again today, and he wrote back that they've been busy, but are still planning to do a follow up. While I'm happy to take him at his word, we promise to keep you updated as to if/when Politifact gets around to doing a deeper dive on the evidence. As far as we're concerned, we think their readers deserve it.

Where the Truth Lies

A mini-debate over at Business Week’s appropriately named Debate Room blog highlights something we often see when pro-nuclear energy meets anti-nuclear energy. See if you can spot it.

First, NEI’s Vice President of Communications Scott Peterson:

Nuclear plants alone won’t improve our air quality but coupled with renewable energy sources, they are a sustainable energy resource that will produce electricity for 60 years or more. As the auto industry develops electric vehicles, using carbon-free nuclear energy to charge them is a win-win for our environment and national security. One nuclear energy facility could charge more than 1.8 million electric cars each night and power mass transit, homes, and businesses during the day.

And Greenpeace’s Nuclear Policy Analyst Jim Riccio:

Our best bet for reducing pollution from coal plants is energy efficiency and renewable energy. These solutions can be deployed more quickly and affordably than wasting billions on a new nuclear reactor. In the past two years, even in tough economic times, the U.S. installed more than 15,000 megawatts of wind power; there hasn’t been a new nuclear plant ordered and completed in the U.S. since 1973.

Let’s leave aside Riccio’s dismissive tone vs. Peterson’s broad embrace of multiple energy sources. What’s interesting is the use of numbers.

Peterson uses simple math – he knows how much electricity a nuclear plant produces, he know how much electricity electric cars need and he divides one number into the other. He  might be lightly dinging solar energy for its virtual absence at night, but that might be a bridge too far.

Riccio, however, Is practicing a rather steeply deceptive game with numbers, counting on the reader not to know details that he himself should know.

Let’s look again:

In the past two years, even in tough economic times, the U.S. installed more than 15,000 megawatts of wind power; there hasn’t been a new nuclear plant ordered and completed in the U.S. since 1973.

In its specifics, this is exactly true. But here’s what missing: wind turbines can produce 15,000 megawatts - if the wind blows 100 percent of the time, but it doesn’t. It blows about a third of the time, thus 15,000 megawatts of installed capacity equals about 5,000 megawatts actually produced over a given period of time.

Conversely, Riccio assumes that nuclear energy facilities have remained utterly static, puttering along now as they always have. But one of the benefits of a plant with a 40 to 80-year lifetime is that it can increase its production as the plant is upgraded with new and improved equipment and as workers become more efficient (at refueling the reactors, for example.)

Nuclear energy plants have, as a fleet, dramatically improved their performance, increasing from a high 60 percent capacity factor in the 1990s to over 90 percent now. As the following chart shows, this is the equivalent of building 29 more 1000-megawatt facilities over the last 20 years. That’s a heck of a lot of windmills.

Now, none of this is to say anything about wind energy one way or another – wind energy advocates know that wind isn’t yet appropriate as a baseload generator of electricity – that is, energy that is produced all the time – and it isn’t they who want to use wind energy as a club with which to pummel nuclear energy.

But using these numbers this way, as Riccio does, leaves audiences with an unusually warped picture of the energy market. This is what is meant by cherry picking – in fact, so much so that it no longer means “to pick cherries” – but picking a number out of a larger set to make the point you want – even if the other numbers in the set disprove your point.

It’s a bad practice, resorted to when choices become limited. That’s what’s Riccio is doing – because his arguments against nuclear energy are so shallow as to be meaningless.

Nuts in April – the German Energy Plan

With Germany aiming to shut down its nuclear energy plants by 2022, it needs replacement energy and quickly. Prime Minister Angela Merkel has put forward a 6-point plan to accomplish this. From Der Speigel:

• Expanding renewable energy. Investing in more wind, solar, and biomass energies will try to raise the renewable-energy share of Germany's total energy use -- from a baseline of 17 percent in 2010.
• Expanding grids and storage. Building a much larger storage and delivery network for electricity -- particularly wind energy, which can be generated in the north but must be carried to the south -- will be a main focus.
• Efficiency. The government hopes improve the heating efficiency of German buildings -- and reduce consumption -- by 20 percent over the next decade.
• "Flexible power." The government wants to build more "flexible" power plants that can pick up slack from wind or solar energy when the weather fails to generate enough electricity during peak demand. The obvious source of "flexible power" for now, besides nuclear energy, is natural gas. [Nuclear may not be great for this purpose because you don’t ramp it down to favor wind. Wind just adds more to the grid in its intermittent way.]
• Research and development. The government will increase government support for research into better energy storage and more efficient grids to a total of €500 million between now and 2020.
• Citizen involvement. The government wants to involve its sometimes-recalcitrant citizenry due to ongoing resistance against wind generators and the installation of an efficient new power line grid in some regions.

Germany is, if nothing else, proposing to spend a lot of money during a period of austerity – someone might notice that it’s almost all unnecessary at some point.

In all, this could be an energy policy nightmare, with a battery of untried ideas all implemented at once to try not to do what seems most likely – a return to coal if not a basic acceptance that German nuclear plants have been unproblematic. 

But maybe not:

Many are now asking themselves if the transition to renewable energies will ruin the nation's countryside. The German Wind Energy Association (BWE) states that 21,607 high-tech wind turbines are already in place in Germany. Some fear that the zeal to install wind turbines mirrors the drive to build motorways into West German towns in the 1960s. That was regarded as ultra-modern at the time, but it created massive, irreversible eyesores.

Germany's Federal Agency for Nature Conservation is already warning that in the rush to expand renewable energies, nature and wildlife conservation is being put on the back burner. The need to get out of nuclear power seems to be overriding all other concerns.

“Many are now asking” is not very precise, but the story points out that Germans have gotten quite litigious on NIMBY issues and have become exceptionally well organized on keeping windmills out of their eyesight. And are gearing up against large masts:

In the eastern state of Thuringia, for example, powerful 380-kilovolt power lines are planned that will cut a route directly through the picturesque Thuringia forest region. A number of citizens' initiatives are organizing opposition to the plans. They include members of all political parties.

Oddly, one of the reasons anti-coal activists take that stand in this country is to prevent mining operations from ripping up the countryside. Now, Germans are adopting the same stance about renewable energy sources. Nuclear energy plants, of course, are fairly compact and uranium mining low-impact.

It’s understandable that countries look closely as their nuclear energy plants in light of Fukushima Daiichi and make changes as appropriate. But what Germany is doing is – kooky – and getting kookier by the day.

Windmills, windmills everywhere.