Magic Two-Thirds: The Proposed EPA Electric-Car Mandate

 

On Apr. 12, the Biden administration announced a new set of proposed Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rulings that would require by 2032 two-thirds (67%) of passenger vehicles sold in the U. S. to be "zero-tailpipe emission" types.  In practice, that means electric cars.  Lower fractions of service and transport trucks would also have to be electric by then.  As reported in National Review, both automakers and consumer advocates criticized the move, saying that the industry is not ready for such a radical shift, and that the result will be higher prices for consumers and shortages of largely foreign-produced materials such as lithium and cobalt. 

 

These proposed rules would be in addition to the Department of Transportation's so-called CAFE standards, a set of fuel-economy requirements that have had the unintended consequence of making U. S. automakers rely mainly on production of larger vehicles (e. g. pickups and SUVs), because of the perverse incentives put in place by the standards.  Unintended consequences always follow mandates like this, and unless the EPA changes its collective mind, there are sure to be problems we can only dream of now caused by such an extreme requirement.

 

For one thing, we are already seeing stresses on the electric grid caused by the rather exotic requirements of rapid-charge stations for electric cars.  The most powerful stations, the "direct-current fast charging" (DCFC) ones, can draw up to 350 kW and charge an all-electric (battery-only) passenger car in as little as 20 minutes.  In doing so, however, it uses as much energy as an average household uses in three days.  Multiply this high-peaking intermittent demand by several million, and you can understand why Californians have already had requests from their state leaders to restrict charging of EVs on hot days when the grid is stressed already.  Mandating that two-thirds of new car sales must be electric will only make this problem worse.

 

More generally, this proposed ruling is a good example of the kind of thing that I mentioned in last week's blog:  the tendency of government leaders to propose progressive-sounding climate-change-prevention measures to go into effect long after they are out of office.  By doing this kind of thing, they try to have their political cake and eat it too.  They get kudos from their supporters for being on the right side of history, but avoid the all-too-real negative and unintended consequences of their proposals, which may never see the light of day in any case.

 

The public is not stupid, on average, and there are signs that outside of Washington and certain elite enclaves, anyway, the constant hyperventilating about climate change is losing its luster for the average voter.  In Vaclav Smil's book How the World Really Works, Smil points out the huge gaps between the aspirational goals set by international meetings such as the Paris Climate Accords and the realities on the ground of how the world's economy relies on giant systems that must use fossil fuels both now and in the immediately foreseeable future. 

 

No one to my knowledge has proposed a battery-electric cargo ship, for example.  The reason is that so much space and weight would have to be occupied by the batteries that the negligible amount of freight transported would be unprofitable.  The only non-fossil-fuel power that is practical for large ocean-going vessels is nuclear energy.  There are only about 160 nuclear-powered ocean vessels in the world, and the majority of those are nuclear submarines operated by the military.  While nuclear energy is a viable option for ships, many ports prohibit nuclear-powered vessels from entering out of safety concerns, and so a sea change (so to speak) would have to occur for nuclear energy to make a dent in shipping.

 

And nuclear energy is simply not an option for air transport, so until much better battery technology is developed, airliners are going to be burning fossil fuels.

 

None of this is to deny that the emission of carbon dioxide by human activity contributes to changes in the climate.  But the uncertainty and variation in how climate is going to change, and how much our burning of fossil fuels will affect that change, make it unreasonable to impose mandates that produce undue burdens on the majority of a population.

 

Suppose that tomorrow, all new internal-combustion-engine passenger vehicle sales in the u. S. were banned.  In a few years, our transportation infrastructure would go a long way toward resembling that of Cuba, where a very few favored individuals can buy new cars, but everyone else gets by with ancient patched-up vehicles that are many decades old.  As my wife and I have learned, today's well-made cars (most of which tend to be Japanese) with care can last twelve or fifteen years, so as long as we could buy gasoline we could deal with such a mandate.  But I can easily imagine the government leveraging the self-driving capability of new electric vehicles to ban older non-self-driving types from certain areas, beginning with urban regions and spreading gradually to the suburbs.  So you would have an even greater divide between rural and urban than we do now:  urbanites zooming around drinking their lattés and reading their smart phones in their self-driving cars, and impoverished rural citizens driving their gas-guzzlers and hunting down bootleg gas stations in small towns in the countryside.

 

It is a weird and unsatisfactory picture, to say the least.  But something like this would result if the Biden administration had the courage of its convictions and imposed rules soon enough to deal with some of the adverse consequences they generate.  And putting off the rules won't make them any better.  It will simply delay the inevitable disruptions that unreasonable government mandates cause, without visiting the consequences on those whose bad idea it was.

 

Perhaps sanity will prevail, and the outcries over the proposed EPA rulings will persuade the unelected bureaucrats in that agency to modify their demands.  That already seems to be happening with previous climate-change commitments that are "honored more in the breach than in the observance."  But sometimes that's a good thing.

 

Sources:  I referred to these articles on the National Review website:  https://www.nationalreview.com/news/biden-unveils-strictest-ever-emissions-standards-in-bid-to-remake-auto-industry/ and https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/04/bidens-draconian-electric-car-mandate/.  I also referred to the websites https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/non-power-nuclear-applications/transport/nuclear-powered-ships.aspx and https://www.statista.com/statistics/198227/forecast-for-global-number-of-containerships-from-2011 for shipping statistics. 

The Case for Nuclear Power

 

In the fall 2022 issue of the technology-and-society journal The New Atlantis, authors Thomas and Nate Hochman examine the pros and cons of building new nuclear power plants in the U. S.  The case of nuclear power is fraught with political issues that are inextricably tied up with technical issues, but the Hochmans do a good job of laying out the problems facing nuclear power and some possible solutions.

 

If nuclear power had not been invented until 2010, say, it would probably be welcomed as the keystone in our society's answer to climate change.  Imagine a source of the most fungible type of energy—electricity—that takes teaspoons of nuclear fuel compared to carloads or pipelines full of fossil fuels, emits zero greenhouse gases, and when properly engineered runs more reliably than wind, solar, hydro, or sometimes even natural gas, as the misadventure of Texas's Great Freeze of February 2021 showed.  What's to oppose?  Well, a lot, as the Hochmans admit.

 

It is perhaps unfortunate that the first major use of nuclear technology was in the closing days of World War II, when the U. S. became the only nation so far to employ nuclear weapons in wartime, killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese with bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The long shadow of nuclear war has cast a darkness over the technology of nuclear power ever since, despite optimistic but misguided attempts to promote peaceful uses in the 1950s. 

 

The Hochmans describe the golden era of U. S. nuclear power plant construction, which ran roughly from 1967 to 1987, as a period in which the two major U. S. manufacturers—GE and Westinghouse—offered "turn-key" plants that were priced competitively with coal-fired units.  The utilities snapped them up, and the vast majority of existing plants were built in those two decades.

 

The turn-key pricing turned out to be a big mistake, however.  Manufacturers expected the cost per plant to decline as economies of scale kicked in, but for a variety of reasons both technical and regulatory, the hoped-for economies never materialized.  The particular pressurized-water technology that was used was adapted from early nuclear submarines, and in retrospect may not have been the best choice for domestic power plants.  By the time the companies realized their mistake and switched to cost-plus contracts, they had lost a billion dollars, and utilities became much less enthusiastic when they had to pay the true costs of building the plants.

 

In the meantime, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was passed in 1970, making it much harder to obtain permits to build complicated things like nuclear plants.  In the pre-Act days, permitting a plant sometimes took less than a year, but once NEPA passed, such speediness (and the resulting economies of fast construction) was a thing of the past. 

 

Then came the Three-Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979 and the Chernobyl plant fire and disaster in 1986, further blackening the reputation of nuclear power in the public mind.  Add to that the not-in-my-back-yard problems faced by attempts to find permanent storage locations for nuclear waste, and by 1990 the U. S. nuclear industry was in a kind of coma from which it has not yet recovered. 

 

The Hochmans point to France as a counterexample of a nation that made a conscious decision to go primarily nuclear for its electric power, and even today about 70% of France's power is nuclear.  But even France is having problems maintaining their aging plants, and French nuclear promoters face the same sorts of political headwinds that prevail in the U. S.

 

Now that climate change is an urgent priority for millions of people and dozens of governments, the strictly technical appeal of nuclear power is still valid.  It really does make zero greenhouse gases in operation, and when properly engineered, it can be the most reliable form of power, providing the essential base-load capacity that is needed to stabilize grids that will draw an increasing amount of energy from highly intermittent solar and wind sources in the future.  Eventually, energy-storage technology may make it possible to store enough energy to smooth out the fluctuations of renewables, but we simply don't have that now, and it may not come for years or decades.

 

In the meantime, there are plans on drawing boards for so-called "modular" plants.  If every single automobile was a custom design from the ground up, including a from-scratch engine and body, only the likes of Elon Musk could afford to drive.  But that was how nuclear plants were made back in the day:  each design was customized to the particular site and customer specifications.

 

If manufacturers had the prospects of sales and freedom to develop a modular one-size-fits-all design, they could turn the process into something similar to the way mobile homes are made today:  in factories, and then shipped out in pieces to be simply assembled on site.  And newer designs favoring gravity feeds over powered pumps can be made much safer so that if anything goes wrong, the operators simply walk away and the plant safely shuts itself down.

 

Standing in the way of these innovations are (1) the prevailing negative political winds against nuclear power, enforced with more emotion than logic by environmental groups and major political parties, and (2) the need to change regulations to allow such technical innovations, which currently are all but blocked by existing laws and rules. 

 

In the Hochmans' best-case scenario, the U. S. begins importing modular plants from countries where an existing base of nuclear know-how allows efficient manufacturing, which these days means places like China.  Even if the U. S. nuclear industry turned on full-speed today, it would take a decade or more to recover the expertise base that was lost a generation ago when the industry collapsed.  Regulations and regulatory agencies would change from merely obstructing progress to reasoned cooperation with nuclear-plant manufacturing and installation.  And we would derive an increasing proportion of our energy from a source that has always made a lot of technical sense. 

 

On the other hand, things may just go on as they are now, with old plants closing and no new ones to take their place. That would be bad for a number of reasons, but reason hasn't been the only consideration in the history of nuclear energy up to now.

 

Sources:  Thomas Hochman and Nate Hochman's "Nuclear Power Comeback?" appeared on pp. 3-19 of the Fall 2022 issue of The New Atlantis.

Climate Change and Attitude Change

The old joke about how an optimist and a pessimist can see the same glass of water and say different things about it applies to a lot of things.  The optimist who says it's half full brings a different attitude to the same physical facts that the half-empty pessimist looks at, but draws different conclusions from them. 

Climate change and the effects of rising carbon dioxide levels on global temperatures and weather have led to a widespread attitude of despair, according to Matt Frost, a policy analyst who recently published an article called "After Climate Despair" in The New Atlantis.  His approach to climate change is neither denial nor agreement with the prevailing consensus of certain political groups that we are staring doom in the face.  Instead, it's a good example of how attitude can make a big difference in the interpretation of facts.

The standard high-level public-policy take on climate change goes something like this.  Humankind has foolishly burned itself into an ongoing crisis that will, if not averted by radical and draconian imposition of fossil-fuel bans and restrictions, lead to the downfall of civilization and the destruction of the ecosphere.  The only viable solution is the imposition of a global austerity plan that rolls back global energy use to a level comparable to what it was back somewhere in the 19th century, and even then, it will take decades or centuries before any notable improvement will come.  The fact that the major world governments have not fallen into line and cooperated with this solution is cause for despair, a despair akin to that which relatives of a hopeless drug addict feel when they try to intervene, but the addict goes right on shooting up until he overdoses.

Frost begins by distinguishing between the main factor in climate change—namely, the burning of fossil fuels that increase the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere—and the fact that energy abundance and growth is necessary for human flourishing in today's world.  Perhaps the key insight he brings in his set of proposals is that we should look on carbon dioxide emissions not as a horror to be avoided at all cost, nor as totally innocuous, but as waste, similar to sewage, scrap iron, or other byproducts of industrial activity that engineers have learned  how to deal with in the past. 

He examines several proposed solutions that would reduce global warming, and discards them for various reasons.  Switching to burning wood instead of coal and oil and gas is impractical because it would require huge amounts of farmland that we don't have, or that we need already for food.  Throwing tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to reduce the influx of infrared radiation, while possibly reducing global temperatures, might screw up the ecosphere even worse than it is now.  The basic approach he recommends is one of energy abundance, and we have plenty of knowhow to bring that about with only minor changes in directions that we're already pursuing.

For one thing, nuclear energy is sadly underutilized in most countries, a notable exception being France.  While nuclear waste is a problem, it's a localized manageable problem and doesn't automatically escape into the air and cause climate change.  Treating carbon dioxide emissions as a waste product similar to sewage would allow the sensible, deliberate implementation of regulations backed by engineering solutions that might lead to sequestering or reuse of the gas, which after all, given sufficient energy, can be reconverted into fuel again.  While such processes are done only on a pilot scale today, if we realize that lower energy prices would make them more practical, we could break through the barrier of despair and do something about carbon in the atmosphere by means of the very energy that the present despairing attitude would have us say good-by to.

Another good point that Frost makes is that these sorts of things can be done on a small scale:  a solar installation here, a carbon-abatement plant there.  These sorts of things don't need any giant global bureaucracy to administer.  While dealing with the present and future consequences of climate change will present challenges that are in some ways unique, throwing up our hands and giving up on civilization is not the answer.  In a sense, engineering got us into the situation we're in today, and as long as we believe engineering can help us deal with the consequential problems, we have a handle on possible paths to solutions.   

As I read Frost's article, it occurred to me that some of what he's proposing has already taken place.  Watt for watt, burning natural gas for energy produces less carbon dioxide emission than burning coal.  An early worrier about climate change in, say, 1990, might have come out in favor of a massive government-directed effort to shut down all our cheaply operating coal-fired power plants and force them to burn expensive natural gas, at the price of raising electricity prices by 300% and causing a recession.  

That didn't happen, but something else did that bureaucrats didn't expect.  The petroleum industry developed fracking and a spectrum of other technologies that led to the exploitation of abundant natural-gas reserves in old oil fields, which has sent natural gas prices plummeting and shuttered coal-fired plants, not because they're illegal, but because they're unprofitable.  As a result, the U. S. power-generation industry is now more carbon-friendly than it used to be as a whole, all without heavy-handed government intervention.

We can't rely on the market to pull this kind of benign trick all the time, but it's an example of how a can-do optimistic attitude toward a difficult situation can lead to surprisingly good results.  Perhaps not all of Frost's specific policy proposals will find favor in the halls of power, but what I hope people do take from him is his attitude.  In the Roman Catholic catalog of sins, despair is the one unforgivable sin, because by definition, if you give up hope of salvation, you can't be saved.  The principle has applications beyond theology.  If we decide that the only way to reduce carbon emissions is to achieve the politically impossible, well, by definition, that's not going to happen.  Frost's advice is to look at the wide array of possible and even local things we can do, and work on those.

Sources:  Matt Frost's article "After Climate Despair:  Embracing Abundance in a Warming World"  appeared in the Fall 2019 issue of The New Atlantis, pp. 3-21.  I also referred to Mr. Frost's webpage at mwfrost.com, where from his resumé I learned that he has five children, and is thus invested in seeing the future turn out better than it might. 

A Close Shave With Plutonium Foam

Plutonium is nasty stuff.  It's highly radioactive, so breathing plutonium dust is not a good way to live to a ripe old age.  And did I mention it's an essential ingredient in most thermonuclear weapons?  For these and many other reasons, nuclear waste contaminated with plutonium is not something you just toss in the ordinary trash can.  That is why, at great trouble and expense, the U. S. Department of Energy built the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) about fifteen years ago, a few miles outside Carlsbad, New Mexico.  It is the nation's only federally operated "permanent" disposal facility for nuclear waste.  I put permanent in quotes, because, well, something that happened last Valentine's Day showed that so far, putting stuff there is anything but permanent storage.

WIPP is in a salt mine, but salt happens to be a byproduct.  The reason WIPP was constructed in the middle of a large salt deposit is that over geological time scales, salt acts more like Silly Putty than rock—it bends and flows instead of breaking, and seals any cracks that might develop.  So the scientists and engineers who designed WIPP chose to site it thousands of feet underground in a salt deposit so that even after 10,000 years, underground water would be unlikely to penetrate to the still-radioactive byproducts of nuclear-weapons manufacturing, which comes from a number of national labs dating all the way back to World War II.  And for most of the facility's history, things went more or less according to plan.  After they dug tunnels in the salt and opened up an area the size of several soccer fields, they began filling the space with 55-gallon drums full of nuclear waste from places like Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory and elsewhere.

Then, on the night of Feb. 14, 2014, when no one was actually underground but some monitoring personnel were standing their watches on the surface, a radiation alarm went off alerting technicians to high levels of radioactivity underground.  The expert who knew what to do about such an alarm was not on duty.  They tried to contact this person, without success.  This went on till early on the morning of Feb. 15, when some workers began to suspect that the radiation released underground might be coming up through the ventilation system to the surface.  After trying to change some ventilation filters, managers finally ordered the WIPP personnel to go to a safe location, but by that time they had been exposed to low levels of radiation, as a later investigation showed.

What happened?  According to a recent report in the Los Angeles Times, one of the drums stored underground spontaneously ruptured, spewing out several cubic feet of white foam laced with plutonium.  Some of the foam or vapor from it got into the ventilation system that exchanges air between the underground rooms and the surface.  This system had radiation detectors, and in the event of a release of radioactive material, it was supposed to divert the ventilation air to filters that would catch all radioactive particles.  But the dampers assigned to do this leaked, and lots of contaminated air got to the surface anyway.  Over six months later, WIPP is still in a partial-shutdown mode, and estimates of what it will take to restore it to safe operation range up to $100 million or more. 

Opinions on the propriety of nuclear technology range all the way from "no way, José" to "nuclear energy is our best weapon against global warming" and everywhere in between.  Dead-set opponents of nuclear energy will see in the WIPP accident evidence that plans to keep nuclear waste safe for thousands of years in an underground facility have now been revealed to be a sorry joke.  The disabling of WIPP for receiving nuclear waste has not only put the whole idea of underground disposal into doubt, but has also caused a chain reaction (so to speak) of delays in cleanups of nuclear labs around the U. S.

For those who still believe nuclear energy is a good long-term option for our future energy needs, the WIPP accident shows how even the best-laid plans can be upset by a failure of management integrity.  Even now, no one knows exactly what happened chemically inside that drum to cause it to rupture.  Investigations have revealed lapses in the procedures used to transfer information about each drum's contents to WIPP operators.  In other words, WIPP managers are not sure what went into that drum in the first place, so they don't have a basis for duplicating it and maybe finding out how to prevent other similar ruptures.  Finding one rattlesnake just hatching out of an egg strongly motivates you to wonder where the other eggs are, and the WIPP people may be sitting on dozens of plutonium rattlesnake eggs.  And you thought you had problems.

All this talk about 10,000-year lifetimes makes me wonder what will be left of our own civilization even a thousand years from now.  Egypt has its pyramids, Greece has its temples, and maybe all we'll have is WIPP? 

A few days ago, a relative of mine sent me a video of the opening of a time capsule that was buried only fifty years ago, in 1964, at the founding of a bank in Fort Worth, Texas, where my father used to work.  Whoever designed that time capsule did a good job:  along with the perishable newsprint and film reels, they packed a sock full of desiccator and sealed the whole thing with an air-tight lead seal.  As a result, the stuff inside looked like it had just been put on the shelf yesterday. 

A 50-year time capsule is a far stretch from a 10,000-year nuclear waste repository.  But when we are talking about stuff that could kill anyone it touches, the highest standards of engineering and safety must be followed, from the minute that hazardous waste reaches WIPP to the end of the 10,000-year warranty period.  There will be pleas for more money for WIPP as a result of this accident, but money isn't the only answer. 

Money can't buy integrity, and money alone can't bring into being a cadre of dedicated individuals to whom their duty with regard to safety is their highest calling.  About the only place in government you can find this attitude consistently these days is in the military.  I'm not saying we should call in the Marines to take over WIPP.  But if they did, I bet you wouldn't have any more twelve-hour delays between the time an alarm went off and the time appropriate actions were taken. 

Sources:  One of the first reports of the WIPP accident was carried by National Public Radio at http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/02/28/283773449/13-workers-exposed-to-radiation-at-n-m-nuclear-waste-dump.  The most detailed news report I have found was from the Los Angeles Times, which published it online on Aug. 23 at http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-nuclear-waste-accident-20140824-story.html.  I also referred to the Wikipedia articles on "Waste Isolation Pilot Plant" and "Plutonium."  For those interested, the opening of the 50-year time capsule at the former City National Bank is described in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram at http://www.star-telegram.com/2014/08/27/6072685/banks-50-year-old-time-capsule.html.