Bill Gates tells us that even with the most widespread deployment of alternative energy and the elimination of the nastiest fossil fuel emissions, the earth will still fall roughly 30% short of meeting its expected energy needs. His answer: a ground-up redesign for safer nuclear power generation. Combining government with his own funding, Gates has supported research that has led to the development of cost-efficient construction, much safer nuclear fuel usage and the elimination of a concentrated steam-powered electrical generation.
He told CNBC (February 25th): “‘There’s a new generation [of nuclear power] that solves the economics, which has been the big, big problem,’ he said, referring to the fact that the power plants are very expensive to build. ‘At the same time, it revolutionizes the safety.’
“Innovations include using liquid sodium instead of water to cool the reactor at a lower pressure, which can help avoid meltdowns and also allows nuclear power plants to be smaller and therefore simpler to build… ‘As we solve these engineering problems and cost problems, I hope people will be open-minded to see how incredibly safe the next generation will be,’ Gates told [interviewer Adam] Sorkin. Gates is an investor in and founder of TerraPower, one of the leading new nuclear power companies.”
Still, with lingering memories of Chernobyl and Fukushima destruction, despite those being very old-world nuclear power stations, the return to nuclear power – even under the most modern and safest configurations – is going to be a more difficult sell. Even if that alternative just might be inevitable. The first steps in countering our climate change emergency have to be a very quick end to the use of coal-fired anything. Despite verbiage to the contrary, there is no existing commercially viable method to produce “clean coal.” After some scrubbing, we just shove the effluents underground for future generations to address. Can we shove more carbon-based effluents underground or recapture and neutralize them?
Indeed, there is a growing notion that we not only need to stop adding greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere but that active steps must be taken to suck these carbon-based gasses out of the air. There are technology sectors focusing on exactly that alternative, still struggling with whether or not that feat is feasible on a scale that is reasonably possible. Environmental leader California is now facing some of those existential choices.
Evan Halper, writing for the April 22nd Los Angeles Times, sets the stage: “It is no small undertaking. Installing sci-fi-type machinery to pull carbon from the air — or divert it from refineries, power plants and industrial operations — and bottle it up deep underground is a monumentally expensive and logistically daunting challenge. It is one climate leaders now have no choice but to try to meet as they race to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, the central commitment of the Paris agreement on climate change, which aims to avert cataclysmic effects.
“‘To have any chance of holding warming below that level, you can’t do it simply by limiting emissions,’ said Ken Alex, a senior policy advisor to then-California Gov. Jerry Brown who now directs Project Climate at the UC Berkeley School of Law. ‘You have to sequester significant amounts of carbon.’
“The recognition has pushed state regulators to start drafting blueprints for what could be one of the larger infrastructure undertakings in California history. Millions of tons of carbon dioxide would need to be captured and compressed into liquid form, at which point it would be either buried throughout the state or converted into materials for industrial uses such as manufacturing plastic and cement… The state is essentially starting from zero. There are no large-scale carbon-removal projects operating in California.”
The technology is still at a nascent and fairly primitive stage. Most of the efforts are focused on removing the nasty gasses from the air and sequestering them. Neutralizing these emissions seems farther down the road. “Among the most ambitious are the backers of a process known as direct air capture, through which giant fans suck carbon from the atmosphere.
“The technology has been deployed in modest demonstration projects — including one in Menlo Park — for years but never at a scale large enough to make a meaningful dent in emissions. With the cost of running the machines on the decline and the willingness to consider increasingly outside-the-box solutions on the rise, as well as a new administration in Washington promising an infusion of federal subsidies, the vacuum approach is suddenly getting a lot of attention.
“‘The question had always been, could we fund a multi-hundred-million-dollar plant, find a site and get it built?’ said Steve Oldham, chief executive of Carbon Engineering, a direct-air-capture company based in British Columbia, Canada. ‘The answer now is, fantastically, yes.’
“California regulators are closely watching the progress of the hulking direct-air-capture facility the company is building with Occidental Petroleum in the Permian Basin in Texas [pictured above]. The 100-acre operation aims to capture up to 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year… Even if the Texas plant meets its goals, the carbon dioxide it removes would account for less than 1% of the emissions California needs to pull from the atmosphere to hit its climate targets, according to estimates by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
“‘The models are telling us these approaches are essential, but we don’t yet know if they will be successful,’ said Simon Nicholson, co-director of the Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy at American University in Washington. ‘There is lots of promise, lots of potential, but not yet lots of proof.’…
“California officials say direct-air-capture developers are eyeing where in the state they can build. Some are looking toward remote areas in Northern California where they could tap into geothermal energy… Others are more focused on the deep underground basins of the Central Valley, suitable for storing billions of tons of carbon dioxide.
“The vacuums are just one of many technologies California and other states are investigating in their sprint toward carbon removal. Back in Washington, there is a bipartisan push to allocate billions of dollars to the construction of pipelines and storage facilities for all the carbon dioxide lawmakers envision will be diverted underground in the coming years.” LA Times. Experts say the storage potential in the Central Valley and other sites in California is on the order of magnitude of 70 billion tons. We need to embrace the fastest path to carbon-based gas reduction, and while this is clearly only an interim solution, we just might not have time for perfection.
I’m Peter Dekom, and our existing slow and steady climate change reversal is now clearly vastly too little and vastly too late.
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