The Oil Ceiling

The expression “glass ceiling” is probably familiar to most of my readers. It refers to that invisible barrier of unwritten rules that prevents women and minorities from being promoted past a certain level. Being an energy wonk, I am interested in an analogous concept I’ll call the oil ceiling.

I recently read an interview on a site called Energy Bulletin with Steve Kopits. Kopits is an energy analyst with a well-respected international consulting firm. He came to the study of peak oil almost accidentally while preparing documents for an investor prospectus. The interview is well worth a few minutes, but here is a major point for me:

Question: Could you tell us about your views on the US oil price threshold for recessions?

Kopits: The US has experienced six recessions since 1972. At least five of these were associated with oil prices. In every case, when oil consumption in the US reached 4% percent of GDP, the US went into recession. Right now, 4% of GDP is $80 oil. So that’s my current view: If the oil price exceeds $80, then expect the US to fall back into recession.

Right now the price of oil is bumping along in the mid 70 dollar range, with occasional excursions into the red zone. As the economies of China and India continue to expand, expect their oil demand to increase proportionally, even as world oil production stagnates. $80 per barrel oil plus some speculative overshoot is predictable.

It seems that our economy is hitting the oil ceiling. The U.S. being such a profligate consumer of oil, sucking up 25% of the world supply, we can’t get around this barrier. The situation seems set up for an endless cycle of recession, partial recovery, a resulting run up in oil prices, and recession again.

I looked around for numbers on the Vermont economy and found that our State GDP is around 25 billion dollars. Our energy expenditures are just over a billion, much of that being oil products, and 90% of that going out of state almost instantly. That puts Vermont right at the 4% limit. Could we be bumping our heads on the oil ceiling as well?

What this tells me is that in order to avoid a perpetual sawtooth graph of economic performance we need to gear up for energy efficiency. In chemistry and economics a process is limited by the scarcest necessary element. That element will be energy. The economic winners of the future will be localities with the lowest energy inputs per unit of productivity. The most prosperous populations will be those with the lowest energy use per capita. Parallel to this, the economic winners will be the places that make the fastest and most coordinated switch to renewable energy sources.

Part of this process will be the simple, usual efficiency practices such as weatherization and industrial efficiency programs. The promotion of public transportation will be important. All this is commonplace.
 
The real differentiator, however, will be the rethinking of mobility and community itself. Some of this is in the realm of municipal, regional, and state land-use planning. People will need to work, shop, and entertain themselves near to where they live. For many people this is presently impossible. In the future it will be a necessity. This requires the rezoning of towns and cities and a coordinated long-term plan for localized economic development. It would help to strengthen our communication network so that people can telecommute – it may become the default for information workers. We will have to reverse the long-term trend of emphasis on increasing mobility in favor of a focus on access. We’ll have to stop thinking in terms of how to move ourselves to something or move that something to us. We’ll need to have what we need on a day-to-day basis close at hand.

Vermont is already one of the least energy intensive states, but we’ll need to do more. The less oil we need per capita and per dollar of GDP, the higher the price of oil (and coal and natural gas) can go before it starts to drag down our economy. If we manage this well enough, oil price at which Vermont suffers can be higher than the price at which other economies go into recession and bring the price of oil back down. I suppose it is selfish, but my thought is that an energy efficient Vermont economy could be prospering while the rest of the world bangs its head on the oil ceiling.

Tritium Leak at Vermont Yankee

It’s been all over the news for the past few days. Water contaminated with tritium, a radioactive substance, has been leaking out of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. The discoveries began with water containing 22,000 picocuries per liter (ppl, more on this later) in a test well near the plant, continued with water containing one to two million ppl in an open trench, and keeps accelerating today with a report of 150 gallons at 720,000 ppl in an underground storage room.

Part of the story is that Entergy, the owner of Vermont Yankee, told Vermont regulators there were no underground pipes carrying radioactive materials at the plant. Entergy spokesman Rob Williams claimed that this was a mistake rather than a lie. This merely adds the alternative of gross incompetence to the probability of dishonesty. Entergy is searching for the leak while an underground plume of tritium-laced water heads for the nearby Connecticut River.

Those are the reports so far, but there are a number of basic questions confronting Vermonters, as well as our neighbors downstream. What is tritium? Where does it come from? How dangerous is it? What can be done about it?

Tritium is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen. Ordinary hydrogen is made up of one proton and one electron. It is the lightest and most common element in the universe, and, of course, one of the two elements in water. When exposed to radiation, as in a nuclear plant, some hydrogen becomes tritium, consisting of one proton, two neutrons, and an electron. This arrangement is unstable and will eventually decay into helium, releasing beta radiation. Beta radiation is essentially high-powered electrons. Tritium has a half life of about 12.3 years, meaning that if you put 1000 atoms of tritium in a jar and wait 12.3 years you will have 500 atoms of tritium. 500 will have decayed. Another 12.3 years and you will have 250. The rule of thumb for radioactive materials is that they need to sit around for 10 to 20 half-lives (120-240 years in the case of tritium) before they are safe.

So what is a picocurie, and what is a million picocuries in the scheme of things? A curie is a measurement of a radioactive material in terms of disintegrations per second. If a sample of material has 37,000,000,000 (3.7 x 1010) atoms decaying and emitting radiation every second, then that is one curie. A picocurie is a trillionth of a curie, which amounts to 2.2 disintegrations per minute. Thus, a million picocuries per liter (ppl) means that each liter of water emits 2.2 million beta particles a minute.

What does that mean for human health? How dangerous is this stuff? Federal regulations put the safe limit for drinking water at 20,000 ppl. In Europe the limit is 2,000, and in California the limit is 500. I have read that research indicates no safe threshold for tritium. There are a few unpleasant problems with the stuff. Being an isotope of hydrogen, it is part of water molecules themselves. This means it can’t be filtered out of water by any practical means. If it is ingested in water it clears out of the human body in about 10 days, as long as that human body doesn’t drink more tritium-laced water. However, if it is ingested by humans in food it can integrate itself into our tissues and remain for ten years, quietly bombarding us from the inside. It can lodge in our DNA, damaging the genetic code all around it. Its ability to insinuate itself into our systems has caused researchers at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory to assign it an RBE (radiobiological effectiveness) ratio of 1.5 to 5 times that of other radioactive materials. That means that given the same ppl, tritium will cause 2 to 5 times the actual damage of something emitting gamma radiation or x-rays.

Tritium causes all the usual radiological effects: cancer, genetic defects, cell death, birth defects, and loss of fertility.

How much tritium is normal? Tritium is caused not only by nuclear reactions in power plants, but also by cosmic rays hitting our atmosphere. There is a background level of tritium in water of 3 to 24 ppl. That puts the tritium-contaminated water in that trench at somewhere between 42,000 and 660,000 times the usual background level and 50 to 100 times the federal limit.

My conclusion from all this is that the present tritium leak at Vermont Yankee is no small thing. The material is dangerous at low concentrations, persistent in the human body, impossible to filter, and hard to contain. The leak is limited to the area in and around the plant for now, but I can’t imagine the isolation and cleanup is going to be easy.

I’d also conclude that the management at Entergy should start planning for decommissioning Vermont Yankee on schedule in 2012. Even the Douglas administration, long time servant of Entergy, has reacted strongly. I predict that more damning evidence will come out, more tritium will leak, and Entergy will continue its tone-deaf attempts at smoothing things over. Vermont Yankee is a turkey, folks, and it has been in the radioactive oven for a few decades now. Stick a fork in it, it’s done. Let me update that cliché: Stick a really long-handled fork in it and then carefully encase that fork in concrete and let it sit a couple of centuries.

Update on Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 10:26AM by Minor Heretic

It gets better, or worse, depending on your enjoyment of shadenfreude. An article in the Times Argus this morning reports that VY officials submitted documents showing over 40 buried pipes at the plant. A year ago they said there were none. The scenario of incompetence or ignorance has now been completely superceded by the reality of blatant, unrepentant lying. I would predict that the Vermont Legislature will now stick a fork in Vermont Yankee, hard, with both hands.

Giving to Haiti

As a service to my readers, here is a link to the American Institute of Philanthropy. The linked page gives a list of highly rated charities that are performing earthquake relief in Haiti.

American Institute of Philanthropy Haiti Relief

I offer this in part for people who are wondering where to give, and in part as a guard against "insta-charity" scams. Beware of telephone solicitations for emergency donations. Hang up, go to a site such as the one above, and find out about the organization before giving.

Butter

I am sitting at the end of a long farm table, looking at a scattering of condiments towards the other end. Among the salt shakers and bottles of hot sauce is a three inch yellow cube on a plate under plastic wrap.

I should tell you that this farm is on an island and has (among many other animals) one extremely free-range dairy cow. I forget her name, but she has one. I encountered her a number of times as we both wandered around the farm pursuing our respective agendas. Both involved renewable energy - photovoltaics and wind on my part, indigenous biomass on her part.

When I sat down to my first meal here the cook pointed out both the regular butter and the farm butter. At first I didn’t get it. The yellow cube she pointed to looked like a chunk of cheddar cheese. It didn’t register as butter to my eyes. Later I figured it out and tried some.

It was as different from store-bought butter as cream cheese is from aged cheddar. The farm butter was a brilliantly rich yellow, the real yellow that food processors try to put into supposedly buttery food with artificial color. It was almost tacky looking it was so…real. It had a creaminess and an uber-buttery flavor alien to the white stick of the grocery store. The texture was firmer than commercial butter at room temperature, but not as hard when chilled. I was thrilled and consumed a goodly portion of heavily buttered homemade bread.

Of course I asked to buy a pound to take home. The only problem is that it will run out and the farm is too far to visit just to get butter.

I mention this experience to point out part of what we have lost with industrialized agriculture. We have gained convenience, for sure. We have cheap food, or at least cheap calories. We have consistency. What we have less of is flavor, color, and texture. Read Michael Pollan and others on the subject and you’ll find that we have also lost nutritional value.

But forget about that for the moment. Let’s consider consistency, as in invariability, sameness. It is a culinary virtue only in terms of food safety. The aforementioned cook told me that the character of the butter changed with the seasons, according to the cow’s diet. The spring butter is the richest, when the cow is grazing on the new growth. It gets whiter and leaner in the winter when the cow can’t graze at all. How wonderful. I want my food to carry the sign of when it was created. It’s not just about some romantic vision of agriculture. It’s about knowing, truly understanding, what I’m putting into my body. I like being able to meet the person who produced my food. Or the cow, for that matter. That is real food safety.

Michael Pollan writes about the abstraction of food. Beef is beef is beef, wherever it came from. Eggs are eggs and butter is butter. In the past few years people have been challenging this abstraction by pointing out the real differences in taste and nutrition between industrially produced food and traditionally produced food. The difference is there, it is real, and it is dramatic. The contrast just smacked me between the eyes again.

Buttered toast for breakfast tomorrow.


Megatons to Megawatts – For the Moment

Because of the upcoming (possible) legislative debate over the fate of Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant (VY), I’d like to discuss the issue of nuclear fuel. I hear a lot of discussion about operational safety and waste disposal, both of which are vital issues. Nevertheless, before we get to either of these issues somebody has to make some fuel rods out of Low Enriched Uranium (LEU) and get the nuclear reaction going. It could be a problem in the near future.

The worldwide nuclear power industry uses roughly 65,000 tonnes (funny spelling = metric tons) of uranium oxide annually. The problem lies in the fact that not all of this uranium is actually dug out of the ground on a year-to-year basis. About 13% of it comes from recycled nuclear weapons.

Back in 1993 the United States and Russia agreed to take the leftover Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU) from the downsizing of their nuclear arsenals and blend it down to LEU for use in nuclear power plants. The HEU, between 10% and 90% U-235, is mixed with depleted uranium or minimally enriched uranium to reach a concentration of 4-5%. The U.S. and Russia each contracted a reprocessing company to do the job and the uranium market was soon glutted with the stuff. Uranium prices were held below $20/lb till 2004.  New exploration for uranium came to a near halt.

Just for a sense of scale, the word from the World Nuclear Association is that “the blending down of 500 tonnes of Russian weapons HEU will result in about 15,000 tonnes of LEU over 20 years. This is equivalent to about 152,000 tonnes of natural U, or just over twice annual world demand.”

So, here we are approaching 2013, which happens to be the end date for that treaty. It raises several problems, including a possible interim shortfall due to a lag in resource development, a possible price spike, and issues with country of origin.

The first problem is the interregnum in the development of new mines and some glitches in the operation of existing ones. From 1985 to 2004, there was nearly zero mine development. Since the uranium price spike of 2007, nearly $140/lb., there has been more activity, but not sufficient to make up the loss of HEU-sourced fuel. Meanwhile, a flood in a major Canadian mine and a fire in an Australian mine have cut production and forced a larger drawdown of stockpiles.

The loss of the surplus military contribution to worldwide uranium supplies would undoubtedly cause another price spike. I wouldn’t presume to even ballpark the magnitude right now, what with the jumble of political and economic factors. I should note that fuel cost is only 9% of the cost of nuclear plant operation, but balance that with the fact that the price of uranium shot up by a factor of ten from 2003 to 2007. It has settled back to the $40-$55 range for the past couple of years.

So where does uranium come from? Right now, Canada and Australia each account for about a quarter of world production, with Kazakhstan coming third at about 15%. The U.S. share is about 3%. As stated above, 13% comes from the U.S./Russian weapns recycling. Canada’s production has been declining since 2001 and the U.S. peaked in 1980. Australia has restrictive laws on uranium mine development and may or may not decide to expand its largest mine in 2010. The real player in the longer term looks to be Kazakhstan. Do we really want to be dependent on Kazakhstan for our power prices? Kazakh President-for-life Nazarbayev would like that.

At the moment the U.S. uses just under 19,000 tonnes of uranium a year and produces 2,000 tonnes. We are the world’s biggest consumer of nuclear fuel. Of the next six top consumers (France, Japan, Russia, Germany, South Korea, and the U.K.) only Russia produces more than it consumes. The rest produce no uranium, or almost none in the case of Germany. In the international market, China and India are competing for long term contracts as they plan the expansion of their nuclear power industries. It’s looking to get messy when the military supply dries up. Even the World Nuclear Association, which one would assume to take an optimistic position, predicts a dropoff in world uranium production after 2015. The most optimistic rational scenario I have seen puts peak uranium in the year 2020.

This brings me back to Vermont Yankee. If the legislature approves a relicensing in 2012, how many years of operation would we get out of it before uranium prices make it uneconomical? Two? Three? Eight? Geology is inexorable. It just doesn’t care what we want, and it disappoints us more often than not. All safety considerations aside (and that’s a long distance aside) the fuel supply issue seems like a bad gamble.