Military interests are pushing new nuclear power, and the UK government has finally admitted it

[DBoon]

https://phys.org/news/2024-01-military-nuclear-power-uk.html

The UK government has announced the "biggest expansion of the [nuclear] sector in 70 years." This follows years of extraordinarily expensive support.

Why is this? Official assessments acknowledge nuclear performs poorly compared to alternatives. With renewables and storage significantly cheaper, climate goals are achieved faster, more affordably and reliably by diverse other means. The only new power station under construction is still not finished, running ten years late and many times over budget.

So again: why does this ailing technology enjoy such intense and persistent generosity?
...
Official UK energy policy documents fail substantively to justify nuclear power, but on the military side the picture is clear.

For instance, in 2006 then prime minister Tony Blair performed a U-turn to ignore his own white paper and pledge nuclear power would be "back with a vengeance." Widely criticized for resting on a "secret" process, this followed a major three volume study by the military-linked RAND Corporation for the Ministry of Defense (MoD) effectively warning that the UK "industrial base" for design, manufacture and maintenance of nuclear submarines would become unaffordable if the country phased out civil nuclear power.

A 2007 report by an executive from submarine-makers BAE Systems called for these military costs to be "masked" behind civil programs. A secret MoD report in 2014 (later released by freedom of information) showed starkly how declining nuclear power erodes military nuclear skills.

[SarahD]

1. Bigger is better.

They have a military-industrial complex much like ours. Nuclear power is a big solution to a big problem and it comes from an engineering perspective, where there is only one solution and it's my solution and it's the right solution. So shut up and accept it. Of course, expanding nuclear power will do little except stimulate more demand, which will promote more nuke plants, which will stimulate more demand, and so on, and so on.

[hunter]

3. I had a similar position when I started posting here on DU. I changed my mind.

I've played around with the math and come to the conclusion that an E. F. Schumacher style "Small is Beautiful" world economy cannot support eight billion people.

Without fossil fuels the human population would not have grown to eight billion in the first place. We are dependent on high density energy resources.

If we don't quit fossil fuels now, billions of people are going to suffer and die as a consequence of global warming.

If we pretend we can replace fossil fuels with wind, solar, magical batteries, and other "renewable" energy schemes, billions of people are going to suffer and die from global warming, the misallocation of rarer natural resources, and energy shortages.

Like it or not, nuclear power is the only energy resource capable of displacing fossil fuels entirely, which is something we must do. Otherwise we're simply saying "fuck off and die" to a large fraction of the human population. None of us can assume we won't be among those doing the suffering and dying.

[SarahD]

4. Power and population.

Unlimited power will encourage unlimited population growth. This will correct itself when overpopulation causes a big die-off.

[hunter]

5. I don't care to promote any big "die-off" of the human population.

We know what positive forces stabilize human populations -- among those are the economic empowerment of women, easy availability of birth control, realistic sex education, and a certain basic level of affluence, the sort of affluence that affords indoor plumbing, modern sewage treatment systems, healthy foods, and comfortable shelter. We also know that the people with the smallest environmental footprints generally live in cities, don't own cars, and have mostly vegetarian diets.

Unfortunately, what we now call economic productivity is almost a direct measure of the damage we are doing to the earth's natural environment and our own human spirit, largely because this false productivity is powered by fossil fuels and wage slavery, or in some cases, outright slavery.

It's simply not ethical to propose limits to economic growth in a world suffering great disparities of wealth, a world where affluent people are burning through resources at a tremendous rate and others are dying because they lack adequate shelter and are exposed to deadly communicable diseases in places lacking modern sanitation systems.

We can solve the disparity-of-wealth problem with progressive taxes. We can create the infrastructure required to support 8 billion people in comfort using nuclear power instead of dangerous fossil fuels.

Or we can wait around and let nature take its usual course.

We won't be the first or the last species to experience exponential population growth followed by collapse. We could be the first species to actually think our way out of this death trap.

Maybe we can achieve a Star Trek future of abundance without the wars and apocalyptic dark ages.

[SarahD]

6. Nukes are a tool of the military-industrial complex.

The way to make money is to stimulate demand and an easy way to do that is by encouraging population growth.

[NNadir]

9. It might be useful to open either a science book, or, alternatively, a book on ethics.

It's really sad that this late in the game we have this sort of narrow thinking, but it really doesn't matter. People who do give a shit about the future are sweeping this weak minded anti-intellectual shit aside.

Since the asshole Amory Lovins wrote this benighted piece of bullshit, Nuclear Power and Nuclear Bombs in 1980, now almost half a century ago, the death toll from air pollution has been on the order of 300 million people, over a quarter of a billion, slightly less than the population of the entire United States.

Global burden of 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 (Lancet Volume 396, Issue 10258, 17–23 October 2020, Pages 1223-1249)

Are cheers for the deaths in order because we have bourgeois types complaining about the existence of "too many people?"

Anyone who complains that too many people exist, conveniently excluding themselves in 100% of the time whenever I hear this rhetoric, are surely cheering for such a death toll, are they not?

How many nuclear wars have taken place since 1980 again? As many as say, in the shit antinukes couldn't care less about, oil wars? Have nuclear wars killed as many people as antinuke ignorance? How about poverty? Have nuclear wars killed as many people as poverty? As many as climate change?

In his bourgeois moral hellhole in the resort city of Snowmass Colorado, like other people who whine about the right of other people to exist, Lovins, the original vapid asshole spreading this idiot rhetoric, has neither the intellectual strength nor the moral depth to apologize for his ignorance or its consequences.

He wants you to send him money as a form of praise, making him sort of the Donald Trump of energy and the environment.

Frankly very few antinukes give a rat's ass about how many people they kill by pushing their ignorance through the rathole of their poor educations. In this they're rather equivalent to antivaxxers, except antivaxxers couldn't possibly aspire to have such a massive death toll as is associated with antinukes.

Nuclear power saves human lives:

Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)

It's all rather disgusting, I think, that this weak minded shit still flies around, but people who care about things like poverty and sustainability really don't have much time for it anymore.

They're rather busy. There is a world to save.

[SarahD]

10. I'm not being entirely fair.

Nukes are better than coal, for sure. They may or may not be better than a combination of wind, hydro and solar. Their big advantage is their enormous capacity, almost limitless. That's a problem because it encourages the idea than we can live to excess without energy worries. We can throw caution to the winds, forget about efficiency, breed like mice, etc. Eight billion people now, then 16 billion, then 32 billion... No problem because we can build limitless nukes and address all problems with electrical power. Nuclear power has been sold to us this way in years past. And it's being sold the same way now, with assurances that technology will ensure us against operator error, will anticipate every contingency, will figure out how to process nuclear waste to produce more reactor fuel. Best of all, total commitment will enable to tame fusion, the power of the sun right here on our own planet. We allowed ourselves to be lulled by similar assurances before and ended up with some faulty designs, careless operation, shortcuts of various sorts, and we panicked when we saw it coming off the rails. The whole cycle is about to repeat itself. I'm not too worried. We'll get rid of coal power. We'll have plenty of reliable electrical power. We'll live like kings for a while, until we encounter the problems we failed to anticipate in our fog of Pollyanna enthusiasm. Oh, well. Full speed ahead. Damn the torpedoes.

[OKIsItJustMe]

7. NREL: Long-Duration Energy Storage: Resiliency for Military Installations

https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy24osti/87646.pdf

Long-Duration Energy Storage:Resiliency for Military Installations
Jeffrey Marqusee, Dan Olis, Xiangkun Li, and Tucker
Oddleifson
National Renewable Energy Laboratory

…

Technical Report
NREL/TP-5C00-87646
October 2023

…

Suggested Citation
Marqusee, Jeffrey, Dan Olis, Xiangkun Li, and Tucker Oddleifson. 2023. Long-Duration Energy Storage: Resiliency for Military Installations. Golden, CO: National Renewable Energy Laboratory. NREL/TP-5C00-87646. https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy24osti/87646.pdf

…

Executive Summary

This report provides a quantitative techno-economic analysis of a long-duration energy storage (LDES) technology, when coupled to on-base solar photovoltaics (PV), to meet the U.S. Department of Defense’s (DoD’s) 14-day requirement to sustain critical electric loads during a power outage and significantly reduce an installation’s carbon footprint. The LDES modeled is Antora Energy’s battery energy storage system (BESS). It is currently at a technology readiness level (TRL) of 7 and not ready for full-scale deployment. To support decisions on the value of near-term demonstrations, this analysis looked at the potential value of Antora Energy’s BESS if deployed in the future.

Antora Energy’s BESS stores thermal energy in inexpensive carbon blocks. To charge the battery on a military base, power from the grid or an on-base solar PV will resistively heat the carbon blocks to temperatures up to or exceeding 1,000°C. To discharge energy, the hot blocks are exposed to thermophotovoltaic (TPV) panels that are like traditional solar panels but specifically designed to efficiently use the heat radiated by the blocks. In addition, the BESS can directly dispatch thermal energy. It is worth noting that Antora has also developed a BESS that outputs only heat, which will be commercially deployed at industrial sites starting in 2025. Two versions of the BESS that could dispatch electricity as well as heat were modeled, one that would be available in the mid- term (the “Intermediate” BESS) and one that could be available in the long-term (the “Goal” BESS). The Intermediate BESS’s costs are approximately twice as much as the Goal costs, and the Intermediate TPVs have a reduced conversion efficiency leading to a system-level AC-to-AC round-trip efficiency (RTE) of 38% vs. 48% for the Goal system.

The techno-economic modeling was done using the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s (NREL’s) REopt® model. REopt was modified to model Antora Energy’s BESS and used in an iterative approach to find cost-effective resilient solutions. To model Antora Energy’s BESS, three key changes to the public version of REopt were required. First, the charging and discharging rates had to be decoupled so that the charging rate was not constrained to equal the discharging rate. Second, the daily loss of stored energy (thermal) needed to be included in the model. Finally, the BESS needed to be modeled like a combined heat and power system that can dispatch both electricity and heat.

NREL selected three installations (Table ES-1) representative of many military installations to assess the costs and benefits of using Antora Energy’s BESS coupled to an on-base PV system to provide energy resilience. They cover three military services and are in different states, with sufficient land to potentially site a large PV system. This analysis used these three installations to illustrate the potential value of LDES, not to design or recommend a solution for these installations. Details of existing energy assets and site-specific constraints were not considered.

…

(Give the study a read. Or keep believing that nuclear can & will be rapidly deployed.)

[OKIsItJustMe]

8. CNN: These hot rocks can glow brighter than the sun. They could also help spell the end of fossil fuels

https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/16/climate/solution-hot-rocks-renewable-energy-battery/index.html

https://antoraenergy.com/technology

https://rondo.com/how-it-works

[NNadir]

2. Anyone with a brain who cares about the environment is pushing nuclear power.

I never hear antinukes opposing fossil fuels because of jet fuel and high explosives, nor about biofuels because of the nature of napalm.

I would note, not that antinukes give a rat's ass about the 7 million deaths from air pollution their rhetoric kills each year, that the path to nuclear weapons disarmament passes through commercial nuclear power.

I covered this on another website: On Plutonium, Nuclear War, or Nuclear Peace.

Weapons grade plutonium is not going to be destroyed by slogans and innuendo thrown around by people who wallow in specious associations. It will be managed by denaturation, the process of swords into essential ploughshares.

Which is responsible for more deaths throughout history, weapons fueled by nuclear materials or weapons fueled by fossil fuels?

Which has caused more wars, the need to access uranium or the need to access oil?

The only thing weaker than the minds of antinukes is their ethics.