On March 11, 2011, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant north of Tokyo was hit by a wall of water 43 feet high that destroyed or disabled enough equipment to cause three reactors to melt down.

Two years later, the people of Japan are bouncing back. The nuclear industry, not so much.

The United States has not (yet) built a new nuclear reactor since 1996 — new U.S. nuclear capacity has essentially flatlined. The U.S. still has far more nuclear power generation than any other country, though China, Russia, India, and Korea are actively constructing new reactors. A few U.S. building permits have trickled in since 2007, when an energy bill with incentives for new nuclear plants passed Congress. The Wall Street Journal reported in December that:

The first newly licensed nuclear-power plant to be built in the U.S. in decades, the Vogtle project in Georgia, has run into construction problems and may be falling years behind schedule, according to an engineering expert advising the state.

Nuclear power may continue to be a small wedge of our energy pie, but it is still not going to be more than a small wedge of the solution to human-caused climate change. Here’s why.

COST

A new nuclear reactor will set you back a cool $10 billion or more. The Department of Energy is promoting a plan to build as many as 50 small modular reactors per year starting in 2040. Constructed in factories, these reactors would cost “only” $3-5 billion each.

But before they even get to building a new reactor, the nuclear industry has relied upon about ten times as much in federal subsidies compared to those reluctantly offered to renewable energy developers. This is important to keep in mind as the industry complains about wind energy subsidies lowering electricity prices.

One of the arguments the nuclear industry has made over the last several decades is that though it is expensive right now, once the industry learns how to construct plants again, the financial structure changes as costs drop. This appears to be the opposite of true: Nuclear power has a negative learning curve.

Average and min/max reactor construction costs per year of completion date for US and France versus cumulative capacity completed.

Nuclear power has always been very expensive, and will continue to be staggeringly so, especially if we are to build in safety and redundancy measures needed to avoid future Fukushimas.

SAFETY

Japan faces combined clean up and compensation costs at Fukushima estimated to reach $500 billion. The timeline for decommissioning the ruined plant is 30-40 years. There is a $6 million robot deployed to inspect the damaged hallways that got lost in the plant and has not been seen for 17 months. And the cost estimates are just guesswork:

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Evaporation from a nuclear plant's cooling towers.

The International Energy Agency concluded that freshwater use is becoming an increasingly crucial issue for energy production around the world in its 2012 World Energy Outlook.

Between steam systems for coal plants, cooling for nuclear plants, fracking for natural gas wells, irrigation for biofuel crops, and myriad other uses, energy production consumed 66 billion cubic meters (BCM) of the world’s fresh water in 2010. That is water removed from its source and lost to evaporation, consumption, or transported out of the water basin — as opposed to water withdrawn, used, and then returned to its source for further availability, which is a far larger amount.

According to figures it shared with National Geographic, IEA anticipates this water consumption will double from 66 BCM now to 135 BCM by 2035 with most of the growth accounted for by coal and biofuels:

If today’s policies remain in place, the IEA calculates that water consumed for energy production would increase from 66 billion cubic meters (bcm) today to 135 bcm annually by 2035.

That’s an amount equal to the residential water use of every person in the United States over three years, or 90 days’ discharge of the Mississippi River. It would be four times the volume of the largest U.S. reservoir, Hoover Dam’s Lake Mead.

More than half of that drain would be from coal-fired power plants and 30 percent attributable to biofuel production, in IEA’s view. The agency estimates oil and natural gas production together would account for 10 percent of global energy-related water demand in 2035….

The surest way to reduce the water required for electricity generation, IEA’s figures indicate, would be to move to alternative fuels. Renewable energy provides the greatest opportunity: Wind and solar photovoltaic power have such minimal water needs they account for less than one percent of water consumption for energy now and in the future, by IEA’s calculations.

This presents a challenge, since river flows, aquifers, and other sources of fresh water are already being strained by the twin drains of population growth and less reliable rainfall due to climate change. The United Nations is projecting that by 2025, 1.8 billion people will live in regions with severe water scarcity, and two-thirds of the world’s population could be living under water-stressed conditions. Given water’s importance in different forms of energy production, this presents a double hit: Less available fresh water for human consumption, plus strained and costlier energy supplies.

IEA sees water consumption for coal electricity shooting up 84 percent, from 38 to 70 BCM per year by 2035. So-called “dry cooling” systems could address this, but the plants cost more and generate electricity less efficiently. Nor is carbon capture and sequestration technology likely to help.

While biofuels’ water consumption will be lower than coal’s — 41 BCM in 2035, up from 12 BCM today — its increase of 242 percent will be much larger. Irrigation requires a lot of water, though estimates vary wildly and the industry claims it’s finding ways to cut back. IEA puts it between four and 560 gallons of water needed to produce one gallon of corn ethanol. Other estimates put it as high as 10,000 gallons of water per one gallon of biofuel. And that’s all bound up with the damaging effect biofuel production is having on world food supplies.

There are solutions, such as moving to less water-intensive methods like pump irrigation, but the trade-off is far more electricity use from potentially unsustainable sources. Cellulosic ethanol, made from non-food sources, is another possibility, but IEA estimates it won’t be commercially viable until at least 2025.

Also, as National Geographic notes, biofuels’ level of water consumption is grossly out of whack with their contributions to world energy supplies: They provide a mere 3 percent of the energy that drives cars, trucks, ships, and aircraft, and IEA projects they’ll increase to just 5 percent by 2035 under current government policies.

As for fracking, IEA’s estimates covered the entire source-to-carrier production process, and under this framework natural gas’ water consumption reach just 2.85 BCM by 2035, or 2 percent of total consumption. Though the concentration of water use at individual fracking projects can still put a strain on water supplies for local commentaries.

Four years before the accident at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission was warned about the possibility of a plant suffering simultaneous meltdowns due to a natural disaster. [NYTimes]

The accident at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant in 2011 alerted the American nuclear industry and its regulators to the possibility that operators at plants with more than one reactor might have to deal with more than one meltdown at a time in a flood, earthquake or other catastrophe. Officials are now working to assure that they could master that situation.

But documents uncovered by a group that is critical of nuclear safety show that a high-level safety analyst at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission posed the possibility to his superiors in July 2007, about four years before the earthquake and tsunami that led to three simultaneous meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi. The documents also show that in August 2008, the commission staff formally acknowledged the issue.

But until Japan’s disaster, progress in the American nuclear industry was glacial….

The warning, which now seems prophetic, predicted “common cause failures,’’ meaning single events that disable different pieces of equipment that are supposedly independent and nearly invulnerable to failing simultaneously on their own. The risk analyst, Richard Sherry, wrote that flooding or earthquakes could disrupt both normal grid power and emergency backup power.

China is trying to get a leg up on clean energy transportation by getting into the patent wars. The country has filed over 2,000 patent applications — 8 percent of the world’s total — placing China third globally. [ChinaDaily]

Greenpeace released a report yesterday warning of various fossil fuel projects around the world that could serve as “carbon bombs,” driving the planet still closer to disastrous levels of global warming. China and Australia topped the list. [The Guardian]

A global and legally-binding agreement to reduce mercury emissions was reached in Geneva over the weekend. But it still faces ratification by over 140 countries, even as studies show mercury levels around the world continue to rise. [LA Times]

The unusually cold temperatures across America’s northern Plains and New England could be due to a combination of a warming event in the upper atmosphere over the Arctic, and fluctuations in a natural cycle of tropical rainfall near the equator. [ClimateCentral]

Ikea will double its investment in renewable energy — including wind farms and solar parks — to $4 billion by 2020, as part of an effort to bring down costs for more cash-strapped consumers. [Bloomberg]

The 20th century was characterized by the frenzied acquisition, storage, and use of oil. But many experts believe that the 21st century will be remembered as the century of water.

One of the most alarming emerging issues is the symbiotic — and often conflicting — relationship between electricity generation and water.

A new report called “Burning Our Rivers: The Water Footprint of Electricity” details this relationship, illustrating the massive amounts of water resources used for electricity generation — particularly from fossil fuels and nuclear.

An average U.S. household’s monthly energy use (weighted by cooling technology and fuel mix) requires 39,829 gallons of water, or five times more than the direct residential water use of that same household…. Electricity—as we generate it today—depends heavily on access to free water. The impact to our freshwater resources is an external cost of electrical production. What the market considers ‘least cost’ electricity is often the most water intensive.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, 53 percent of all the fresh surface water withdrawn for human consumption in 2005 was used for electricity generation.

While consumption in the U.S. is falling, coal is still the most dominant source of power in the country. It is also the single largest consumer of water resources:

A MWh of electricity generated by coal withdraws approximately 16,052 gallons and consumes approximately 692 gallons of water…. On average (a weighted average taking into account the current mix of cooling technologies being used at coal plants in the U.S.), coal-fired electricity requires the withdrawal of approximately 13,515 gallons and the consumption of 482 gallons of water per MWh for cooling purposes.

The water not used directly for power generation is used in mining coal and other treatment before burning, creating millions of gallons of “sludge” that can potentially pollute freshwater supplies.

Nuclear power is not much better:

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Joke is on Progress customers stuck paying nuclear tax

Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

You and Progress Energy walk into a bar. Progress says it’s going to order $24 billion worth of drinks, but they won’t arrive until 2024. Oh, and you have to pick up the tab — even if the server drops the tray and the drinks never arrive at all

So begins a devastating Orlando Sentinel column on Progress Energy’s planned twin nuclear plants.

I wrote about these nukes three years ago – see “What do you get when you buy a nuke? You get a lot of delays and rate increases”:

When we last left Progress Energy in 2008, it had said the twin 1,100-megawatt plants it intends to build would cost $14 billion, which “triples estimates the utility offered little more than a year ago.” And that didn’t even count the 200-mile $3 billion transmission system utility needs, which brings the price up to a staggering $7,700 a kilowatt.

Under Florida law, to pay for these nuclear power plants, Progress Energy can raise the rates of its customers a $100 a year for years and years and years before they even get one kilowatt-hour from these plants. Sweet deal, no?

But as we know, “nuclear power appears to have a negative learning curve.” Heck, three years ago, French nuclear giant Areva “acknowledged that the cost of a new reactor today would be as much as … double the price offered to the Finns.”

So the 2009 Progress Energy price is just a distant memory — as was its original 2016 completion date.  As the Orlando Sentinel explained after Progress raised the projected cost the the third time five years:

The price jumped from $17 billion in 2008 to as high as $22 billion in 2011 and now up to $24 billion today. The company doesn’t expect to start producing power at the plant until 2024, eight years later than it originally thought.

And it’s possible the plant won’t be built at all.

But Progress’ customers are still paying for it each month. Expect an extra $3.45 a month on your bill next year all the way through 2017. That’s a total of $207 during the next five years, if you don’t have a calculator handy.

The nuclear tax — we might as well call it that since it’s a mandatory fee sanctioned by state government — is likely here to stay, though it’s being challenged in court.

New nuclear plants are so expensive they are likely to provide new electricity at some 15 cents per kilowatt hour (see “Nuclear power, Part 2: The price is not right“) — or even higher (see “Exclusive analysis, Part 1: The staggering cost of new nuclear power“).  The precise answer — some 50% higher than average U.S. electricity prices or more — is hard to know since it is hard to find a utility willing to stand behind a firm price in a rate hearing.

Solar power has been coming down in price so fast that it is already a better option than nuclear for those concerned about greenhouse gas emissions, especially if solar could get the same forward pricing deal. The same is true of wind power. Another option would be a hybrid concentrated solar thermal power and natural gas plant (see “World’s second* largest solar plant to be built in Florida“).

But certainly the best and cheapest ‘generation’ option for Florida is energy efficiency (see “Efficiency, Part 3: The only cheap power left“).  If you could forward bill customers for energy efficiency and do every energy efficiency measure that was cheaper than even $.06 a kilowatt hour, you wouldn’t need to build another nuclear power plant — or probably any other plant — for a long, long time.