MIT Study: Nuclear Power Shutdown Could Lead To Increased Deaths

By Brian Westenhaus - Apr 19, 2023

• A new MIT study indicates that retiring U.S. nuclear power plants could lead to an increase in burning fossil fuels to fill the energy gap, resulting in over 5,000 premature deaths due to increased air pollution.
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• Nearly 20 percent of current electricity in the U.S. comes from nuclear power, with a fleet of 92 reactors scattered around the country.
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• If more renewable energy sources become available to supply the grid by 2030, air pollution could be curtailed, but there may still be a slight increase in pollution-related deaths.

A Massachusetts Institute of Technology new study shows that if U.S. nuclear power plants are retired, the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas to fill the energy gap could cause more than 5,000 premature deaths.

The MIT team took on the questions in the text following in a new study appearing in Nature Energy.

Nearly 20 percent of today’s electricity in the United States comes from nuclear power. The U.S. has the largest nuclear fleet in the world, with 92 reactors scattered around the country. Many of these power plants have run for more than half a century and are approaching the end of their expected lifetimes.

Policymakers are debating whether to retire the aging reactors or reinforce their structures to continue producing nuclear energy, which many consider a low-carbon alternative to climate-warming coal, oil, and natural gas.

Now, MIT researchers say there’s another factor to consider in weighing the future of nuclear power: air quality. In addition to being a low carbon-emitting source, nuclear power is relatively clean in terms of the air pollution it generates. Without nuclear power, how would the pattern of air pollution shift, and who would feel its effects?

The team laid out a scenario in which every nuclear power plant in the country has shut down, and consider how other sources such as coal, natural gas, and renewable energy would fill the resulting energy needs throughout an entire year.

Their analysis reveals that indeed, air pollution would increase, as coal, gas, and oil sources ramp up to compensate for nuclear power’s absence. This in itself may not be surprising, but the team has put numbers to the prediction, estimating that the increase in air pollution would have serious health effects, resulting in an additional 5,200 pollution-related deaths over a single year.

If, however, more renewable energy sources become available to supply the energy grid, as they are expected to by the year 2030, air pollution would be curtailed, though not entirely. The team found that even under this heartier renewable scenario, there is still a slight increase in air pollution in some parts of the country, resulting in a total of 260 pollution-related deaths over one year.

When they looked at the populations directly affected by the increased pollution, they found that Black or African American communities – a disproportionate number of whom live near fossil-fuel plants – experienced the greatest exposure.

Lead author Lyssa Freese, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) said, “This adds one more layer to the environmental health and social impacts equation when you’re thinking about nuclear shutdowns, where the conversation often focuses on local risks due to accidents and mining or long-term climate impacts.”

Study author Noelle Selin, a professor in MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) and EAPS added, “In the debate over keeping nuclear power plants open, air quality has not been a focus of that discussion. What we found was that air pollution from fossil fuel plants is so damaging, that anything that increases it, such as a nuclear shutdown, is going to have substantial impacts, and for some people more than others.”

The study’s MIT-affiliated co-authors also include Principal Research Scientist Sebastian Eastham and Guillaume Chossière SM ’17, PhD ’20, along with Alan Jenn of the University of California at Davis.

Future phase-outs

 When nuclear power plants have closed in the past, fossil fuel use increased in response. In 1985, the closure of reactors in Tennessee Valley prompted a spike in coal use, while the 2012 shutdown of a plant in California led to an increase in natural gas. In Germany, where nuclear power has almost completely been phased out, coal-fired power increased initially to fill the gap.

Noting these trends, the MIT team wondered how the U.S. energy grid would respond if nuclear power were completely phased out.

“We wanted to think about what future changes were expected in the energy grid,” Freese says. “We knew that coal use was declining, and there was a lot of work already looking at the impact of what that would have on air quality. But no one had looked at air quality and nuclear power, which we also noticed was on the decline.”

In the new study, the team used an energy grid dispatch model developed by Jenn to assess how the U.S. energy system would respond to a shutdown of nuclear power. The model simulates the production of every power plant in the country and runs continuously to estimate, hour by hour, the energy demands in 64 regions across the country.

Much like the way the actual energy market operates, the model chooses to turn a plant’s production up or down based on cost: Plants producing the cheapest energy at any given time are given priority to supply the grid over more costly energy sources.The team fed the model available data on each plant’s changing emissions and energy costs throughout an entire year. They then ran the model under different scenarios, including: an energy grid with no nuclear power, a baseline grid similar to today’s that includes nuclear power, and a grid with no nuclear power that also incorporates the additional renewable sources that are expected to be added by 2030.

They combined each simulation with an atmospheric chemistry model to simulate how each plant’s various emissions travel around the country and to overlay these tracks onto maps of population density. For populations in the path of pollution, they calculated the risk of premature death based on their degree of exposure.

System response

 Their analysis showed a clear pattern: Without nuclear power, air pollution worsened in general, mainly affecting regions in the East Coast, where nuclear power plants are mostly concentrated. Without those plants, the team observed an uptick in production from coal and gas plants, resulting in 5,200 pollution-related deaths across the country, compared to the baseline scenario.

They also calculated that more people are also likely to die prematurely due to climate impacts from the increase in carbon dioxide emissions, as the grid compensates for nuclear power’s absence. The climate-related effects from this additional influx of carbon dioxide could lead to 160,000 additional deaths over the next century.

Freese noted, “We need to be thoughtful about how we’re retiring nuclear power plants if we are trying to think about them as part of an energy system. Shutting down something that doesn’t have direct emissions itself can still lead to increases in emissions, because the grid system will respond.”

Selin added, “This might mean that we need to deploy even more renewables, in order to fill the hole left by nuclear, which is essentially a zero-emissions energy source. Otherwise we will have a reduction in air quality that we weren’t necessarily counting on.”

***

This kind of work is always useful. Yet there always remain the matters of the assumptions used for inputs and the model itself. Even so, there is obviously some impact from removing a source that has its carbon imprint already in as paid for and replacing it with a new facility and different fuel source.

Then there is the political forcing issue that isn’t in the popular press, either legacy or modern internet sites. There is a huge increase in power demand being forced. One fellow, John Kudla came up with some numbers, not a model, just a napkin listing of what the political forcing is going to entail. It destroys the premise of nuclear substitution with either renewables or fossil power for generating current to meet the political demands. Note, the elites will be running the energy segment of the economy instead of the market.

For 100 years electrical power development has become the engine for modern life. Taking nuclear power and fossil fuels out of the energy source foundation is an idea of immense size and deep concern. Any hope of living standards getting better as a whole – disappear. Only the very wealthy and elites can expect a lifestyle of some equivalency to today. Its only natural – they’ll be running the system.

THEY ALREADY ARE

By Brian Westenhaus via New Energy and Fuel 

 

G7 Ministers Decide Natural Gas Investment Is Still Necessary

By ZeroHedge - Apr 18, 2023

• Environmentalists are unhappy with the results of the last G7 summit in Sapporo.
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• The G7 ministers also concluded their conclave on Sunday without setting a deadline for halting new coal investments.
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• The G7 ministers agreed that new investment in natural gas was still needed.
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Environmentalists are up in arms over apparent slack added to the Group of Seven's energy and environmental goals, after ministers decided that the 'war in Ukraine and its effects on oil and gas' warrant breaking what are supposed to be 'firm commitments' that climate advocates say are necessary to limit global warming. 

Nishimura Yasutoshi, Japan's Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry, Environment Minister Akihiro Nishimura and other delegates attend the opening session of G7 Ministers? Meeting on Climate, Energy and Environment in Sapporo, Japan April 15, 2023, in this photo released by Kyodo. Mandatory credit Kyodo via REUTERS

Most notably, the ministers left the door open to new investment in natural gas and ongoing use of fossil fuels.

The G7 ministers also concluded their conclave on Sunday without setting a deadline for halting new coal investments, though they did pinky-swear to 'work toward' cleaning emissions from power generation and reducing vehicle emissions by 2035.

"It falls short of being the clarion call to action that was needed," said Alden Meyer, a senior associate at climate change think tank E3G during a Twitter Spaces conversation, adding that the G7 undermines its global authority "every time they allow carve-outs on issues like international fossil fuel finance."

The G7, the seven most developed countries, consider themselves stewards of the global effort to reduce greenhouse glasses - and their communique 'sets the tone for negotiations around energy and climate among the Group of 20 countries and at the UN climate summit — COP28 — in Dubai in November,' Bloomberg reports.

The new statement seemed to weaken at least one previous commitment, climate activists said.  At last year’s meeting, the group’s promise was specific: to halt “new direct public support for the international unabated fossil fuel energy sector by the end of 2022, except in limited circumstances clearly defined by each country that are consistent with a 1.5°C warming limit.”

But now, with the war in Ukraine and its effects on oil and gas supplies stretching into a second year, the group said “investment in the gas sector can be appropriate to help address potential market shortfalls,” as long as they’re “implemented in a manner consistent with our climate objectives and without creating lock-in effects.” -Bloomberg

French Energy Minister Agnes Pannier-Runacher pushed back at critics, saying that the new language was actually more strict than what was originally envisioned, and that it "implicitly means that we cannot invest in the exploration of new gas capacity."

She also told reporters on Saturday that while the highlight of this year's negotiations was an agreement to phase out 'unabated' fossil fuels more rapidly, the group "could not reach an agreement on exiting coal by a specific date."

The final language was said to have been crafted to appease Japan, which hosted the meeting, as well as Germany's Deputy Energy Minister Patrick Graichen, which called the group's position "carefully balanced."

That said, the G7 meeting did result in several commitments - including a plan to boost solar capacity by more than 1,000 gigawatts, and offshore wind generation to 150 gigawatts across member nations by the end of the decade, a move which would triple solar power and increase offshore wind capacity seven-fold.

"The G-7 are confirming that solar and wind are in line for takeoff," said Dave Jones, head of data insights at energy think tank Ember said in the same Twitter Spaces, adding that the commitments show "very clearly that wind and solar are the biggest and cheapest tools in the toolbox to reduce emissions this decade."

The group also acknowledged, but did nothing about, a plan to collectively cut vehicle emissions by at least 50% by 2035.

By Zerohedge.com

Atomic Breakthrough Could Have Huge Implications For Petroleum Refining

By Brian Westenhaus - Apr 18, 2023

• University of Wisconsin-Madison chemical engineers have developed a model of catalytic reactions at the atomic scale.
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• The model uses powerful simulation techniques and offers deeper insights into transition metal catalysts and their role in industrial processes.
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• This breakthrough could potentially lead to energy savings, greener industrial processes, and more energy-efficient catalysts.

University of Wisconsin-Madison chemical engineers have developed a model of how catalytic reactions work at the atomic scale. It should be an advance considered a breakthrough in computational chemistry research. The understanding could allow engineers and chemists to develop more efficient catalysts and tune industrial processes – potentially with enormous energy savings, given that 90% of the products we encounter in our lives are produced, at least partially, via catalysis.

The team published the news of their advance in the journal Science.

Catalyst materials accelerate chemical reactions without undergoing changes themselves. They are critical for refining petroleum products and for manufacturing pharmaceuticals, plastics, food additives, fertilizers, green fuels, industrial chemicals and much more. There are two brief motion videos available in a zip file at this link on the Science abstract page.

Scientists and engineers have spent decades fine-tuning catalytic reactions – yet because it’s currently impossible to directly observe those reactions at the extreme temperatures and pressures often involved in industrial-scale catalysis, they haven’t known exactly what is taking place on the nano and atomic scales. This new research helps unravel that mystery with potentially major ramifications for industry.

In fact, just three catalytic reactions – steam-methane reforming to produce hydrogen, ammonia synthesis to produce fertilizer, and methanol synthesis – use close to 10% of the world’s energy.

Manos Mavrikakis, a professor of chemical and biological engineering at UW-Madison who led the research said, “If you decrease the temperatures at which you have to run these reactions by only a few degrees, there will be an enormous decrease in the energy demand that we face as humanity today. By decreasing the energy needs to run all these processes, you are also decreasing their environmental footprint.”

Mavrikakis and postdoctoral researchers Lang Xu and Konstantinos G. Papanikolaou along with graduate student Lisa Je developed and used powerful modeling techniques to simulate catalytic reactions at the atomic scale. For this study, they looked at reactions involving transition metal catalysts in nanoparticle form, which include elements like platinum, palladium, rhodium, copper, nickel, and others important in industry and green energy.

According to the current rigid-surface model of catalysis, the tightly packed atoms of transition metal catalysts provide a 2D surface that chemical reactants adhere to and participate in reactions. When enough pressure and heat or electricity is applied, the bonds between atoms in the chemical reactants break, allowing the fragments to recombine into new chemical products.

Mavrikakis explained, “The prevailing assumption is that these metal atoms are strongly bonded to each other and simply provide ‘landing spots’ for reactants. What everybody has assumed is that metal-metal bonds remain intact during the reactions they catalyze. So here, for the first time, we asked the question, ‘Could the energy to break bonds in reactants be of similar amounts to the energy needed to disrupt bonds within the catalyst?'”

According to Mavrikakis’s modeling, the answer is yes. The energy provided for many catalytic processes to take place is enough to break bonds and allow single metal atoms (known as adatoms) to pop loose and start traveling on the surface of the catalyst. These adatoms combine into clusters, which serve as sites on the catalyst where chemical reactions can take place much easier than the original rigid surface of the catalyst.

Using a set of special calculations, the team looked at industrially important interactions of eight transition metal catalysts and 18 reactants, identifying energy levels and temperatures likely to form such small metal clusters, as well as the number of atoms in each cluster, which can also dramatically affect reaction rates.

Their experimental collaborators at the University of California, Berkeley, used atomically-resolved scanning tunneling microscopy to look at carbon monoxide adsorption on nickel (111), a stable, crystalline form of nickel useful in catalysis. Their experiments confirmed models that showed various defects in the structure of the catalyst can also influence how single metal atoms pop loose, as well as how reaction sites form.

Mavrikakis says the new framework is challenging the foundation of how researchers understand catalysis and how it takes place. It may apply to other non-metal catalysts as well, which he will investigate in future work. It is also relevant to understanding other important phenomena, including corrosion and tribology, or the interaction of surfaces in motion.

“We’re revisiting some very well-established assumptions in understanding how catalysts work and, more generally, how molecules interact with solids,” Mavrikakis said.

***

Its well worth a read of the press release as there are 6 paragraphs of credits for collaborators, and support of funding and resources. It looks like this is a much bigger project than a press release can describe in a few paragraphs.

This work looks like something that time will prove to be very significant. Eight metals were tested in the work and collaboration was running experiments for model confirmation. It looks like a very well thought through program of research.

When this level of importance comes along there is one thing that seems is always missing in the press releases. One does wonder about the hypothesis mentioned above, was that what set this program in motion? If it was, the team got very far along, indeed.

By Brian Westenhaus via New Energy and Fuel

Li Auto Is Making Major Moves In China’s Competitive Car Market

By Michael Kern - Apr 18, 2023

• Li Auto is expanding its lineup to 11 models by 2025.
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• The expansion includes one flagship model, five range-extended electric models, and five high-voltage pure electric models.
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• Li Auto also aims to build over 3,000 supercharging stations across China by 2025.

Li Auto Inc, one of China's up-and-coming electric vehicle (EV) producers, is looking to expand its footprint in a big way, announcing on Tuesday that it aims to add seven new cars to its lineup.

The new lineup will include five range-extended electric models, five pure electric models, and its flagship model. The vehicles will be priced at 200,000 yuan ($29,100) and up.

Ma Donghui, Li Auto's president and chief engineer, announced the new lineup at the Shanghai auto show, noting that Li Auto's current best-selling car in China - the Li One sport utility vehicle (SUV) - delivered 257,334 cars in total in 2022. 

In addition to the rollout of its new fleet, Li Auto is also working on the construction of 300 high-speed charging stations across China. The stations will be installed across the Yangtze River Delta and Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region and is expected to be completed by the end of the year. 

By 2025, Li Auto aims to build over 3,000 supercharging stations across China, covering 90% of major cities and highways.

The ambitious plan is part of a larger trend among Chinese EV makers looking to capitalize on the growing demand for electric vehicles in their home market. 

In addition to Li Auto's expansion plans, other Chinese EV makers such as NIO Inc., Xpeng Motors and WM Motor Technology Co Ltd have also announced plans to expand their own product lines. 

NIO recently announced that it would launch an all-new sedan model, while Xpeng Motors has revealed plans for a new SUV model with extended range capabilities. 

WM Motor Technology Co Ltd is also planning a new lineup of cars with advanced autonomous driving features and improved battery technology for longer-range capabilities.

These moves come at a time when global automakers are increasingly turning their attention towards China's rapidly growing EV market. 

Volkswagen AG recently announced that it would be investing $12 billion into its Chinese operations over the next five years. General Motors said it will launch ten all-new EVs in China by 2025 under its Cadillac brand alone.

Chinese EV makers are set to benefit from this increased competition as they continue ramping up their product offerings to capture a larger share of this rapidly expanding market segment. 

With Li Auto's ambitious expansion plans now officially announced, we can expect even more exciting developments from them in the near future as they look to solidify their position among China's leading EV manufacturers.

By Michael Kern for Oilprice.com

A U.S. Shale Job Boom Is Coming

By Tsvetana Paraskova - Apr 18, 2023, 

• Energy research firm Rystad Energy believes the U.S. shale patch is set for a job boom, with wages for shale workers set to grow through the end of 2024.
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• The average wage growth is forecast to be between 2.5% and 7.2% in 2023 and 2024, which will contribute to higher costs for operators.
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• Executives have warned that a tight labor market, high wage pressures, and supply-chain issues are adding pressure to drilling activities.

Rising oil and gas production in the U.S. shale patch is expected to bring higher wages for workers in the sector as companies need to attract more labor in an already tight market, energy research firm Rystad Energy says.  

Wages are set to grow through the end of 2024, due to the tight labor market, retirements in the industry, and competition from clean energy jobs, Rystad Energy said in a new report quoted by the Journal of Petroleum Technology.   

Average wage growth is expected at 2.5% and 7.2% in 2023 and 2024. Wages have already grown in the key shale basins, including the Permian, the Eagle Ford, Haynesville, Williston, and Appalachia, according to Rystad Energy. Those areas saw on average over 9% growth in wages in 2022.

The growth in wages has increased the budgets of the operators in the shale patch and contributed to cost inflation.

According to the Dallas Fed Energy Survey for the first quarter, executives at Permian operators saw oil and gas expansion stall amid surging costs and worsening outlooks.

The aggregate wages and benefits index edged higher, to 43.6 from 40.2, according to the survey.

Asked about what changes they expect in the workforce at their company from December 2022 to December 2023, more than half of the executives — 55% —expect their headcount to remain unchanged from December 2022 to December 2023. However, 37% of executives expect the number of employees to increase, of which 4% expect a significant increase and 33% anticipate a slight increase. Only 8% anticipate the number of employees decreasing over the period, according to the survey.

Whereas the most-selected response among E&P firms was for employment to “remain the same” in 2023, the most-selected response of support service firms was for employment to “increase slightly” in 2023, the poll found.

One executive at a services firm said in comments to the survey, “Regulatory uncertainty is a major overhang. Labor remains tight, with continued wage pressures. Supply-chain issues remain.”  

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com