Category: The environment

I routinely give speeches about global warming, and so I know from experience that one of the first three or four questions will be about nuclear power. A man – always a man – approaches the microphone and asked with barely concealed glee if building more reactors isn’t the “solution” to the problem. His thought, usually, is that I am an environmentalist, and hence I must oppose nuclear power, and hence aren’t I a moron. Which I may be, but in this case nuclear power mainly serves to illustrate the point I’m trying to make about the difficulty of changing direction quickly. It’s quite true that nuclear power plants don’t seem as scary as they did a generation ago – not that they’ve gotten safer, but other things have gotten nastier. I mean, if a nuclear plant has an accident, it’s bad news, but if you operate a coal-fired plant exactly according to the instructions, it melts the ice caps and burns the forests. Still, nuclear plants are frightening, in part because new ones spill so much red ink. A series of recent studies have found that the capital costs of new conventional atomic reactors have gotten so high that, even before you factor in fuel and operations, you’re talking seventeen to twenty-two cents per kilowatt-hour – which is two or three times what Americans currently pay for electricity.

And that’s if the plant gets built on time. “Delays would run the costs higher,” as one study put it, and nuclear plants are always delayed. Consider, for instance, what happened in Finland, where the country (thinking ahead, in a Scandinavian way) decided in 2002 to build a new nuclear power plant in an effort to cut carbon emissions. The New York Times called the choice prescient, and the right-wing Heritage Foundation heralded it as rational, but a more accurate adjective would have been pricey. It was supposed to be completed in 2009 but now won’t come online until at least 2012, and the original budget has gone up by more than half to $6.2 billion. A reporter visiting the site found the interior of the containment vessel “was lined with a solid layer of steel that was crisscrossed with ropy welds. On the surface someone had scrawled the word ‘Titanic.'” As a result of troubles like that, a 2008 report from Moody’s Investors Services concluded that any utility that decided to build a reactor could harm its credit ratings for many years. A Florida utility, in fact, predicted that even a six-month delay in its building plans could add $500 million in interest costs. And this was all before the great credit crunch at the end of the Bush administration. Bottom line: building enough conventional nuclear reactors to eliminate a tenth of the threat of global warming would cost about $8 trillion, not to mention running electricity prices through the roof. You’d need to open a new reactor every two weeks for the next forty years and, as the analyst Joe Romm points out, you’d have to open ten new Yucca Mountains to store the waste. Meanwhile, uranium prices have gone up by a factor of six this decade, because we’re – you guessed it – running out of the easy-to-find stuff and miners are having to dig deeper.

McKibben, Bill. Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. 2010. p. 57-8 (softcover, italics in original)

Related:

• The difficulty of assessing the cost of nuclear power
• Finland’s nuclear waste dump
• The costly nuclear option
• Choosing nuclear

If a way could be found to make firms and governments take it seriously, it seems like a single auction of all the planet’s ‘safe’ remaining carbon emissions could be an alternative form of carbon pricing with some virtues.

Starting with the goal of keeping warming to under 2˚C, we could estimate the total quantity of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that humanity can still produce. In order to make the auction at all fair, it would need to take into account national populations and levels of wealth. Probably, it should be set up so that everyone is positioned to acquire equal per-capita shares in the world’s remaining emissions.

If confidence is created that no more credits will ever be auctioned, we can expect the price of those from the initial auction to rise across time as people use them up and trade them. People in countries with excessively high per-capita emissions (like Canada, Australia, and the United States) will find themselves burning through their reserves at a frightening pace, and face a strong incentive to cut emissions quickly.

Of course, there would be many challenges with such an approach. Governments would need to agree to participate. Global monitoring of GHG emissions would be necessary. Rogue governments, individuals, and firms could simply disregard the system. Splitting up the emission allowance between present and future generations is also a major problem (especially since the smartest course of action is probably to save a big chunk of the remaining total for the activities that are hardest to decarbonize, like air travel and space launches). All that being said, an auction of the whole resource would strongly reinforce the idea that humanity has a finite amount of atmospheric space for GHG pollution and that we need to move aggressively to stay within the limit.