The Crash Course - Chris Martenson [88]
Cost. Trillions and trillions of dollars. The price tag to build a modern 1 gigawatt nuclear plant is $5 billion (in 2010). Maintenance and fuels costs add another $6 million per year per plant. Merely doubling the world’s nuclear plants would cost $2.2 trillion. Assuming we could get past the issues outlined in time and scale, and could build the roughly 200 nuclear reactors per year required to offset falling oil production, the price tag over just a single decade would be in the vicinity of $10 trillion.
The Coal Story
When he was president, George W. Bush gaffed on national television when he declared that the United States still has “250 million years of coal left.”19 Even if he were to have said what he meant, which was” 250 years of coal left,” he would still have been wrong. In truth, the only possible way to get to 250 years of coal is to start with the most optimistic possible estimate about U.S. coal reserves and then divide it by current consumption, which is unrealistic because our consumption of coal is constantly growing. Realistically, if coal consumption continues to increase as it has done in every decade since at least 1800,20 it’s not possible to have anything close to 250 years of coal remaining.
As Albert Bartlett makes clear, one cannot reasonably leave out growth in consumption when discussing how long something will last. That would be like claiming that you had spent nothing in the past five minutes and that therefore the money in your wallet would last forever. Bartlett has been dissecting the innumeracy of our growth and energy policies for decades, and has pointed out some massive logical errors in our thinking, such as this statement taken from a U.S. Senate report: “At current levels of output and recovery, these American coal reserves can be expected to last more than 500 years.” Of this, Bartlett said:
There is one of the most dangerous statements in the literature. It’s dangerous because it’s true. It isn’t the truth that makes it dangerous, the danger lies in the fact that people take the sentence apart: they just say coal will last 500 years. They forget the caveat with which the sentence started. Now, what were those opening words? “At current levels.” What does that mean? That means if—and only if—we maintain zero growth of coal production21
He goes on to note that even the Department of Energy admits that perhaps half the coal reserves aren’t recoverable, immediately dropping the estimate to 250 years. If we do that and assume that coal production increases at the same rate that it has for the past 20 years, then the known reserves will last for between 72 and 94 years; within the life expectancy of children born today. In terms of outlook, what’s the difference between 250 years of coal left and 72 years? In a word, everything.
So what can we say about coal consumption? First, coal is by far the dominant energy source for the production of electrical power (see Figure 17.1).
Figure 17.1 Electricity Generation by Power Source
Source: Energy Information Administration.
The use of coal has been growing worldwide at very fast rates, largely driven by China but also by the base growth of power needs in other countries. Even in the United States, where 250 years of coal supposedly remain, the United States is likely to become a net importer of coal by 2015 or so22 because it won’t be able to meet its own demand for certain types of coal, principally low-sulfur coal. Not by much, mind you, but a net importer all the same.
Coal production in the United States, as measured by tons mined, has been steadily growing at roughly 2 percent per year since the 1940s. This sort of stable, continuous, but ultimately exponential growth is exactly what our economy and society demand (see Figure 17.2).
Figure 17.2 Total U.S. Coal Production
Source: Energy Information Administration.
Of course, there’s a wrinkle in this story.