White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Carbon Solution Obama Won’t Take to Paris

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By Llewellyn King

The Treaty of Paris, signed in 1783 by representatives of King George III of England and the fledgling United States of America in a Paris hotel, ended the Revolutionary War.

Next month, another document will be signed in Paris: the climate agreement. It will be signed by about 200 countries, and will commit the signatories to meaningful reductions in their greenhouse gas emissions, mostly carbon. And it will be as seminal in its way as the one recognizing that the colonists of America would no longer be subject to the rule of England.

My point is not that this treaty of Paris will be perfect, or that every signatory will abide by its terms, but that it will do something that is vital, if climate change endeavors are to prevail: It will establish globally a kind of carbon ethic.

The concept of an environmental ethic started with Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring,” back in 1962. Since then, the world has known it should examine the environmental impact of major actions. After Paris, it will consider the carbon impact in a new way.

President Obama’s supporters will be jubilant when the signing starts in Paris. But Obama does not deserve all the praise that will come his way from Democrats and environmental organizations.

If the Obama administration were as concerned with the reduction in greenhouse gases, particularly carbon, as it says it is, it would not have given the back of its hand to nuclear power. Nuclear produces a lot of electricity and no greenhouse gases. Zero.

Yet the administration, yearning for a carbon-free future, has done nothing to address the temporary market imbalance that cheap natural gas has produced. Get this: a nuclear plant has a life of 60 years, and new ones may last 80 years. What we have now is a short-term price advantage in natural gas forcing the closure of nuclear plants, even though gas will cost more over the decades.

The administration leans heavily toward wind and solar power, understandably against coal and almost ignores nuclear. For example, nuclear does not get the support it deserves in the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan: its blueprint for carbon reduction. Nuclear is an also ran, not a central plank.

The nuclear project needs updating. It needs a revision of the standards for radiation protection which were enacted when nuclear science was young and radiation little understood. They need to be reevaluated and almost certainly lowered in the light of today’s science. This would help across the nuclear spectrum from power plants to medicine to how nuclear waste is handled.

The administration declares itself in love with innovation and has offered partial funding for new, small modular power plants. But it does this without regard to the dysfunctional nature of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. This bureaucracy is so sclerotic, pusillanimous and risk averse that it has priced new reactors out of the possibility of being built in the United States. Because the NRC is a fee-collecting agency, it is estimated that to license a brand new reactor — a better, safer, cheaper reactor — would cost $1 billion and 10 years of hearings and submissions. That is a preposterous inhibitor of American invention.

If the Federal Aviation Administration acted as the NRC does, we might well be flying around in propeller aircraft, while the agency studied jet engines and, for good measure, questioned the ability of wings to provide lift.

Certainly, the NRC should be protected from outside pressure that might impinge on safety, but it should not be so ossified, so confined in a bunker, that it cannot evaluate anything new.

Yes, something big is going to happen in Paris: Those big polluting nations, China and India, but especially China, are going to lay out their ambitious plans to reduce carbon — with nuclear.

Champions of the president will cheer Paris as a big part of his legacy, but his achievement is less than it should be. And nuclear power, like so much else that America led the world in, is headed overseas where it will evolve and probably flourish as the carbon-free champion of the future. Shame on the administration. — For InsideSources.com

Nuclear Power under Threat

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On the face of it, the nuclear power industry should be enjoying a boom, reveling in its extraordinary safety record and the fact that it is a carbon-free way to make electricity.

But all is not well in atom land. In fact, things are dismal. Only five nuclear plants are under construction, and they are having birth pains as schedules slip and costs rise.

One plant, Vermont Yankee, has been taken out of service and others are on a watch list. This is happening not because of safety or end-of-life, but because cheap natural gas is undermining the economics of nuclear.

The market has spoken and it has determined that gas is cheaper in the short term, and wind and solar, though limited, enjoy social acceptability and declining costs.

The mighty Exelon Corporation is trying to save three, and maybe more, of its nuclear plants with a political fix; arguing that nuclear is a value proposition – its value to the community will continue long after the gas boom has fizzled. It is an argument that might have been made to save commuter railroads in the heyday of the automobile.

But that is not all that challenges nuclear. Despite its environmental advantages in a time of climate change, the public has been steadily turning against nuclear, persuaded by a relentless campaign that has been waged by opponents like the Union of Concerned Scientists and Natural Resources Defense Council and by Japan’s Fukushima accident following an earthquake and a tsunami. Wrongly, it is believed this resulted in lives lost: Many lives were lost to flooding, but not to radioactivity release.

But the public has absorbed a fear of nuclear, unless it is associated with the Navy. That was reflected this month, when a Gallup poll revealed that only 51 percent now support nuclear, as opposed to a traditional divide of 60 percent for and 40 percent against. It is hopeless to expect a big swing to nuclear with this kind of public reaction. The current slim majority favoring nuclear falls far short of a call for action.

More, the nuclear industry has fair share of bad news of its own which does not help the public love the atom.

The San Onofre plant in California was closed down because new steam generators were defective, and the owners decided it was not worth the hundreds of millions it would cost to fix things. Cost overruns and delays, once blamed on environmental opposition, now are almost always a result of problems in the construction.

Much hope has rested on two new reactors being built by the Southern Company in Georgia. Known as Plant Vogtle Units 3 and 4, there are delays and cost overruns and the utility is in court with the prime contractor, the eponymous Westinghouse Electric Company. Although the Southern Company is determined to complete the reactors and under its feisty chairman, Tom Fanning, possibly to build more, the costs are rising.

Just a few months ago, there was hope that new reactors — smaller, mass-produced power plants — were in the pipeline. But now the industry is convinced the next reactor design will have to be developed outside of the United States; probably in Asia, where both China and India are working on radical new reactors, far from today’s light water plants — 100 of them — operating in the United States.

The U.S. challenge is not science or engineering – we have designs aplenty and great nuclear science – but regulation. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) – which protects public health and safety — is not equipped to license a new reactor, and it is believed that a new reactor type would have to spawn a whole new regulatory bureaucracy. One aspirant with a new nuclear design says ruefully, “It’s as though the FAA had recertified every aspect of flying when the jet engine came along.”

The NRC, even its staff admits, is slow and ponderous. What they don’t admit is that the commission is not only protecting the public, by making sure that today’s reactors are safe, but it’s also preventing the public from having better nuclear power in the future.

For the industry the problem is not only the time it would take to bring a new reactor through licensing, but also the cost. The applicant, not the government, pays for the NRC to license a reactor. Some say that cost could run towards a billion dollars.

Considering this situation, U.S. leadership in reactor technology is doomed. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Fasten Your Seat Belt, Obama’s Driving Energy Policy

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By Llewellyn King
 
If President Obama were driving an automobile the way he's driving energy policy, he'd be stopped and breathalyzed.
 
The president’s latest decision to defer a decision on TransCanada's Keystone XL oil pipeline is a sudden swerve to the left, after his sharp right turn in curbing the enthusiasm of the Environmental Protection Agency for limiting electric utility emissions.
 
Similarly Obama has supported some new drilling for oil, but not in all the areas the industry would like to drill. He's in the middle of the road on this one, and no one is happy.
 
On nuclear power, Obama signaled a right turn and veered left. He came to office endorsing the nuclear option, including loan guarantees. But in a tip of the hat to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, the president opposed the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository, and undermined the case he was making for nuclear.
 
The mischief did not end there. Obama appointed Reid’s man, Gregory Jaczko, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to end the Yucca project and entomb, in effect, the $9 billion to $15 billion (depending on who is counting) in its abandoned tunnels. But because the government has longstanding legal commitments to take the waste, and has taken the money charged utilities (about $900 million a year) and treated it like tax revenue, the whole project has torn up the commission and landed it in court.
 
Jaczko, a former Reid aide, has riled the other four commissioners and the NRC staff to such an extent that the four went to the then White House chief of staff to complain about the chairman. An act of frustration totally unprecedented and deeply damaging to the credibility of the commission. Nobody resigned and a damaged regulatory body is now passing on the safety of the nation’s nuclear fleet. To all appearances, the chairman’s remit was to tear things up in the commission; that he has done.
 
In particular, the issue of licensing of Yucca Mountain has caused ructions. Jaczko has stopped the licensing in what the quasi-judicial Atomic Safety and Licensing Board in the case considers an illegal act. According to Marvin Fertel, president of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry wants the licensing to proceed if only to establish that Yucca was the right way to go and that it can stand the scrutiny that the NRC would give it in licensing. Fertel says that it's a marker for the future.
 
Opponents of Yucca, presumably including Jaczko, fear that a license would pave the way for the Yucca project to come back to life under a different administration. Did Obama, a lawyer, not know that political brute force in a regulatory agency is bound to throw it into disarray, and to leave its decisions to be impugned in court later? So why did he do it?
 
When it comes to alternative energy, Obama positively drove on to the left shoulder. The administration has promised wonders from wind, solar and advanced coal combustion. It has thrown money at these as though it were rice at a wedding. The most conspicuous of this mind-over-matter exercise was, of course, Solyndra. But the spending has been lavish, indeed promiscuous, and the bankruptcies are filling up court dockets and right-wing Web sites.
 
Yet, the gods have smiled on the Obama administration. A boom in natural gas, brought on by new technologies, and enhanced oil production, fathered by the same technological improvements, have brought oil imports down below 50 percent for the first time in 20 years. Electricity supply is holding.
 
Environmental organizations, having been cold-shouldered on climate change by the world in a time of economic upset, picked on the Keystone pipeline with fury. Particularly apoplectic about it has been the Natural Resources Defense Council, which hopes that by canceling the project, Canada would stop developing its oil sands.
 
No, says Canada. I spoke with Canadian Natural Resource Minister Joe Oliver shortly before Obama's first decision to delay the pipeline. Oliver said that if the decision weren't favorable, Canada would build a pipeline across the Rockies to British Columbia and export to China.
 
The latest setback has infuriated Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government, which now says it will no longer rely almost entirely on the U.S. market for its hydrocarbon sales.
 
So Obama’s latest swerve has angered our best ally and good neighbor, denied American workers thousands of jobs and will oblige refineries on the Gulf Coast to buy oil from unfriendly places on the world market.
 
He has also given the Republicans a handsome gift in an election year. Masterful! – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate