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Greenpeace Flies Under the Cloud

By Kennedy Maize

Washington, April 2, 2010 — Greenpeace doesn’t like cloud computing. The out-on-the-edge environmental group also doesn’t much care for Apple’s upcoming IPad computer platform, which adds to the data content of the cloud.

The dirty secret of cloud computing, alleges the environmental group, is that cloud companies are choosing to locate server complexes where Greenpeace doesn’t like the source of the electricity. The report castigates Facebook for locating a server center in Oregon, supplied by PacifiCorp, a utility with major coal-fired capacity. The group also congratulated Yahoo for locating a data hub near Buffalo, N.Y., which gives it access to low-cost hydro-generated electricity. Hydro, of course, is a renewable resource, but is much despised by environmental groups, so kudos for breaking with the green wall on environmentally-correct energy.

The proper path, says Greenpeace, always an advocate of governmental approaches, is for multinationals such as Facebook and Google “and other players in the cloud computing market” to push for “policy change and the local, national and international levels to ensure that, as their appetite for energy increases, so does the supply of renewable energy.”

Says Greenpeace, “With the growth of the cloud, however, comes the an increasing demand for energy.” Greenpeace, like almost every environmental group, completely overestimates the ability of renewables to supplant steady, reliable baseload generation, with coal-fired power in the lead. That’s nothing new.

I’d like to see a careful analysis of the main assertion of Greenpeace, that cloud computing is somehow less energy efficient than the alternative — continued reliance on networks of personal computers, not connected to data centers. I don’t have any data, and I lack the analytic skills to run the numbers, but my intuitive, gut-level suspicion is that cloud computing is far more energy efficient than computer data islands, the alternative approach.
And if that is right, then it strikes me that the best societal approach is to find ways to make the cloud computing paradigm as low-cost as possible. Does that mean coal? Sure. Give me coal-powered data clouds.

In this discussion, it’s important to parse the rhetoric. Greenpeace claims cloud computing involves “massive” data storage and “incredible amounts of energy.” I sure as heck don’t know what those claims mean. What’s not “massive”? How credible is “incredible”? Let’s get specific here. Incredible, by the way, means “too extraordinary and improbable to be believed,” according to my dictionary. It’s not a useful term when it comes to descriptions of power demands of data centers.

Iwant to hear from readers on this subject. Am I right? Do I know what I’m talking about? Am I full of it? Fire away, and provide data that is neither “massive” nor “incredible”.

Traveling Wave Reactors: Wave Goodbye

By Kennedy Maize

CNN has described Mryhvold, former Microsoft chief technology officer who left the company in 2006, as a polymath, with degrees in space physics and geophysics, a PhD in theoretical and mathematical physics, a master’s in mathematical economics, a master photographer, a gourmet cook, and a noted paleontologist. One wag (me) described him as the intellectual equivalent Ron Popeel’s Vegamatic kitchen appliance of the 1970s, which could thinly slice “a firm, unripened tomato.”

Mryhvold’s major contributions to Microsoft, before he left with large bags of cash, were the execrable operating systems of the 1990s, Windows 3.1 and Windows 95. Based on my experience, I can only classify these software endeavors as cybergarbage. Not encouraging when it comes to nuclear power technology.

The TWR has come under intense skepticism by physicists. Check out the Physics Forums web site for a taste of derision. I’ll add my own, as a journalist and non-physicist: I’m dubious about any advanced nuclear technology that relies on liquid sodium as a coolant. It’s nasty stuff, and it hasn’t yet worked, to the best of my knowledge, anywhere in the world.

Pushing the Future into the Future

By Kennedy Maize

Washington, March 22. 2010 — Remember all that hype about a nuclear renaissance? Push it all a couple of years into the future, as the economy has caused growth in demand for electricity to slow considerably, making the need for new baseload capacity less pressing.

In a wire service interview, Marvin Fertel, CEO of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the Washington-based lobbying group for the nukes, said he figures new nuclear plant completion dates are probably two or three years later than forecast. “The recession has decreased demand of electricity everywhere,” he said. New plant predicted to come on line in 2017 or 2018 are now probably “2020 projects.”

But that doesn’t mean a decline in the need for baseload generation, as predicted by Federal Energy Regulatory Commission chief John Wellinghoff. He told an energy meeting last year that new coal or nuclear baseload may not be needed “ever”.  That assertion drew derision from many electric industry analysts.

Outgoing Nuclear Regulatory Commission member Dale Klein, former NRC chairman during the George W. Bush administration, told the NEI recently that Wellinghoff “must have a database that’s much different than mine. I think we will have a need for baseload electrical generation for a long, long time. And the facts are the facts. There is no alternative in the near term for anything other than baseload, because for some reason people want electricity at night. They like to keep lights available, and their homes heated if they have electric heat. So I think baseload electrical generation from everything that I’ve studied, and I’ve spent my career in the energy business since the mid-70s, I don’t know how we can have an electrical generation system without baseload.”

Also looking into the future, Australia, a major uranium producer (the Ranger mine is the largest in the world), is looking for big developments in natural gas. Australia in rich in natural resources, including gold, coal, iron ore, and natural gas. That’s how Aussies came to be know colloquially as “Diggers.”

Now, in the state of Western Australia, which includes the vast deserts of the Kimberly region, gas appears to be ascending the minerals throne. The key is the $37 billion Gorgon project, which Chevron is developing some 130 KM off the northwest coast of the Australian frontier state. The project aims to exploit enormous gas resources in order to ship liquefied natural gas to burgeoning economies in Asia, including Japan, China and India.

In late January, Chevron Australia announced it has signed a major contract (300,000 tonnes per year over 15 years) to supply Gorgon LNG to Japan’s Kyushu Electric Power Co. The first deliveries are estimated for 2014. Earlier, Chevron and Nippon Oil Corp. signed a similar deal for 300,000 tons over 15 years of LNG for delivery to Japan.

Australia is already a significant LNG producer, but some estimates reckon that the Gorgon project could quadruple LNG exports. Chevron says of Gorgon, “It is one of the world’s largest natural gas projects and the largest single resource natural gas project in Australia’s history.” Chevron’s joint venture partners in Gorgon are ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell.

Chevron says it will center the Gorgon project on Barrow Island, which has long been the company’s premier site for oil production. The company notes, “Although rated as one of the most important wildlife refuges in the world, Barrow Island’s ecology remains essentially intact.”

Dennis the Menace Takes on Obama Nuke Support

By Kennedy Maize

Washington, March 19, 2010 — The Obama administration’s decision to offer some $8.3 billion in loan guarantees to the Southern Company for a new, two-unit expansion at its Vogtle nuclear power station in Georgia is drawing fire from the Democratic left in Congress. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) has announced that he will hold hearings in his House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee March 23 on the Obama administration policy.

The title of the Kucinich subcommittee hearing is “Nuclear Power’s Federal Loan Guarantees: The Next Billion Dollar Bailout?” In a press release, the domestic policy subcommittee, which Kucinich chairs, said, “The purpose of the hearing is to evaluate the economic advisability in increasing the amount of loan guarantees for construction of nuclear power plants and to determine whether the issuance of those loan guarantees are  likely to lead to a large bailout of the nuclear power industry.”

Kucinich drew recent attention as the first of the liberal Democratic opponents of the Obama administration health care bill in the House of Representatives to announce that he would hold his nose and vote for the bill on final passage. He originally opposed the legislation as not going far enough to provide a government-sponsored health insurance plan to complete with private insurance plans.

Kucinich, 62, represents a blue-collar Cleveland district and is one of the most liberal House members. He has a long record of opposition to nuclear power, stemming from his tumultuous tenure as mayor of Cleveland from 1977 to 1979.

During his Cleveland mayoral years, he was the youngest major city mayor in U.S. history and known as “Dennis the Menace” after the cartoon figure. He won a nasty battle with Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co., an investor-owned utility, trying to take over Cleveland’s municipally-owned utility. At the time, the IOU was insisting that its investments in nuclear power plants would result in much lower electric rates than the muni could offer.

The claim of the investor-owned utility proved hollow, as the nuclear plants came in far over budget and off schedule. Kucinich’s refusal to sell the city electric utility led private interests to force the city into bankruptcy in 1979, and to the election of George Voinovich, now a retiring Republican senator from Ohio, to replace Kucinich as mayor.

The long battle with the investor-owned utilities in northern Ohio left a lasting anti-nuclear taste in Kucinich’s political mouth. He’s long been a champion of greater oversight of nuclear power plants. By most accounts, Kucinich is the farthest left of any member of the U.S. House. But his longevity —  meaning that his constituents in Cleveland and its western suburbs approve of his views, including quixotic runs for the Democratic presidential nomination — has given him a solid leadership position in the House Democratic caucus.

The Kucinich subcommittee hearings, and his agreement to support Obama’s health care plan in the House, suggest that he will be influential in attempting to stop the administration’s plans to expand nuclear plant loan guarantees to $54 billion. Said one nuclear industry analyst, “There’s no way Congress is going to approve this kind of money for new nuclear plants, and the White House will allow Kucinich to claim credit for killing the money. That’s a payoff for his support on health care.”

Curmudgeon’s View: Waste, DOE, and New Reactors

By Kennedy Maize

Washington, March 11, 2010 — As reported in POWER NEWS, the Obama administration has formally pulled the plug on the Yucca Mountain, Nevada, project to store spent commercial reactor fuel, the latest in more than a 50-year record of failure on the part of the federal government to fashion a way to deal with reactor fuel at the end of its useful life. The announcement is also the formal obituary of the 1982 (and 1987-amended) Nuclear Waste Policy Act.

I say, “good riddance.” The nuke waste act was a legal and technical abomination. It was both coercive (eat this, Nevada) and feckless (science? don’t need no stinkin’ science). Yucca became dead dump walking when Harry Reid of Nevada became Senate Majority Leader. The election of Barack Obama nailed down the lid on the Yucca Mountain coffin.

So what’s next in the seemingly endless search for a way to make nuclear waste disappear? Some, including a Republican congressional candidate from New Mexico, are advocating use of the Carlsbad, N.M., salt beds, where the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Project is now storing defense wastes, as an easy answer.

But that doesn’t work. WIPP, which I have referred to in the past as the “wasteful, idiotic pilot project,” is designed to handle transuranic wastes — long-lived, man-made isotopes that are atomically hot, but not thermally alive. WIPP is not designed to handle spent fuel rods, which are not only pumping out radioactivity, but spewing a lot of thermal energy. WIPP isn’t configured to handle conventional heat, and salt has a problem. It melts, and it dissolves in water. Oops!

Others have revived the long-dead nuclear industry panacea of reprocessing. This involves chopping up spent fuel rods, chemically treating them to removed reactor-grade plutonium, and using that as nuclear fuel in sodium-cooled “breeder” reactors that produce more fuel than they use. Here’s the problem: Enriched uranium is cheap. Reprocessed plutonium would be far more expensive than the uranium fuel. On top of that, the remaining liquid chemical residue is nasty stuff of the Superfund variety.

What’s more, as a report from the International Panel on Fissile Materials recently concluded, hopes for breeder technology “are not merited by the dismal track record to date of such sodium-cooled reactors in France, India, Japan, the Soviet Union/Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.” The report notes that Adm. Hyman Rickover, the late father of the nuclear Navy, observed that breeders are “expensive to build, complex to operate, susceptible to prolonged shutdown as a result of even minor malfunctions, and difficult and time-consuming to repair.”

What to do? In my judgment, nothing. Let spent fuel remain at reactor sites, in storage judged safe by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Kick the spent fuel can down the road.

LOL Stimulus Money

The Department of Energy has announced that it is willing to offer $100 million in stimulus funds to bring “green” technologies, whatever that means, to the commercial market. DOE has invented what it claims is a clone of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), calling it DARPA-E.

This, boys and girls, is a joke. DARPA has a multi-decade track record of success, including (eat your heart out, Al Gore) the Internet. DOE has a multi-decade track record of R&D wheel-spinning (recall the hype over geothermal heat pumps and water heaters). Mostly, that’s because DARPA’s research had a real focus on defense-related needs, with little focus on commercial viability. The commercial aspects came later, in the private sector.

DOE’s research objectives are mostly hopeful hand-waving. For example, here is what Energy Secretary Steven Chu allegedly said, reported in a DOE press release: “This is about unleashing the American innovation machine to solve the energy and climate challenge, while creating new jobs, new industries and new exports for America’s workers.”

Huh? Parse that carefully and you get what has been characteristic of the Obama administration, all fluff and no meat. The statement is entirely anodyne. All of the initiatives — health care, financial reform, climate change — the administration claims, achieve multiple goals, not susceptible of quantification. They are the Big Rock Candy Mountain, complete with cigarette trees and lemonade springs where bluebirds sing.

Also, anybody who believes that Chu actually wrote those news release words, please raise your hand. You are voted off the island. Energy secretaries say what their handlers allow them to say and write for them.  Chu is a very smart and amusing guy (he was great on NRP’s “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me”) but he doesn’t say anything about administration policy that isn’t scripted by the White House.

And how does this stuff qualify as “stimulus?” Name the jobs created, the businesses revived, the new industries. Bogus. You can’t do it.

Gaseous Reactor Money

Along those lines, DOE has also announced $40 million in R&D money for a nuclear reactor technology that has been around for five decades, sucked up hundreds of millions of federal money, and failed to demonstrated anything approaching commercial viability. Failed nuclear reactor technologies never die at DOE. They just smell that way, and continue to rake in money, despite the odor.

The energy agency says it will split the $40 million between Westinghouse in Pittsburgh and San Diego-based General Atomics for work on what it calls, with no sense of shame, history, or irony, the “Next Generation Nuclear Plant” or NGNP. Please, this is a last generation technology: high temperature gas-cooled reactors. Looks good on paper, doesn’t work on the ground.

In making the award to keep alive a technology that has never proven commercial, Chu allegedly said: “This investment reflects President Obama’s commitment to building the next generation of nuclear reactors that will create thousands of jobs and supply the clean energy to power our economy. It’s time for America to recapture the lead in the nuclear energy industry and lay the foundation for a stronger, cleaner, and more competitive economic future.”

I doubt that Chu ever said these words, let alone even reviewed them before the press release hit cyberspace.

Helium-cooled, high-temperature reactors have been a pipe dream of the nuclear industry since the early 1950s. The promise has always been been dual-purpose: electricity and high-temperature steam for industrial purposes.

General Atomics developed a 40 MW pilot reactor at the Philadelphia Electric Company’s (now an Exelon unit)  Peach Bottom site in eastern Pennsylvania in the early 1970s. The plant ran well, and that led to several orders for scaled-up commercial reactors (including one at the Tennessee Valley Authority, which, in those days, would buy anything nuclear, no matter how far-fetched). The only HTGR that actually got built was Public Service Co. of Colorado’s 300-MW Fort St. Vrain plant. For a number of reasons, the plant, which operated sporadically between 1977 and 1992, failed. The utility’s successor, Xcel Energy, converted it to a natural gas plant. Sic transit gloria HTGRs.

What are the odds the DOE money will revive this technology? Slim just left the room.