The Mother of All Tragedies

This sermon builds on and depends on the Expensive Nuclear's Dirty Secret piece, which you must read first. The explanatory stuff in Dirty Secret is NOT repeated here.

Thanks to a generous donation from a wealthy member of the choir, the Gordian Knot Group has been able to purchase a license for software able to solve the GKG Grid Model. The model is back up and running.

For our first exercise, we redid the tradeoff mesh of nuclear overnight Capex and Social Cost of CO2 (SCC) for Germany from the Dirty Secret piece, but with the SCC extended all the way up to $51,200/ton, which is deep into Greta territory. Figure 1 summarizes the results.

Figure 1. German Power Costs vs CO2 emissions for a range of nuke CAPEXes and SCC’s. The cost of nuclear increases as you move from the Southwest to the Northeast. The Social Cost of Carbon increases as you move from the Southeast to the Northwest.

The 5 gCO2/kWh Wall

For now focus of the left side of the graph, which is the extremely high SCC area. For each nuke Capex, the curve turns upward as the SCC increases. But the curves basically go no where, Figure 2. The SCC contours accordion together. The model is hitting a wall. It's saying "With the numbers you gave me, I can't decrease the CO2 any further. Therefore, there's no point in increasing the grid cost. Since I'm smarter than humans, I'm not going to waste resources trying."

Figure 2. The Southwest Corner of Figure 1

A Tragedy in Chartreuse

One problem with the high SCC contours crunching together, is the nuclear market penetration numbers end up on top of each other. From all the graffiti on the choir stalls, our generous donor knows how much the choir likes playing with crayons, so he insisted on a prettier version of Figure 1. The GKG Group is in no position to disappoint our sole donor. In response, our graphic artists came up with Figure 3.

Figure 3. Contour Graph of Nuclear Market Penetration

A large portion of this work of art is chartreuse or yellower, meaning the ratio of nuclear power generated to all the power delivered to the grid is better than 80%.¹ If the social cost of CO2 is high enough, it almost does not matter how expensive nuclear is. The problem is, if you want electricity that is both reliable and very low CO2, nuclear has no competitors. What this should tell us is: we must have true competition among and within the various nuclears.

But under the present regulatory system, we will get exactly the opposite. Not only does the present system erect enormous barriers to entry; but under ALARA , it guarantees that the cost of any nuclear will be driven up to the competition. But Figure 3 is telling us, if we must have reliable, very low CO2 power, there is no competition. There is no limit on the cost of nuclear. The result will either be impoverishment or a grid that is slightly more reliable than the weather.

For people whose Social Cost of Carbon is low, say less than $100/ton, this is not a problem. They can be quite comfortable in the southeast corner of the graph. They can rely on coal with some gas peaking, and care less how screwed up nuclear power is. But for people for whom CO2 is an existential threat, it's an existential problem. To move to a very low CO2 economy without impoverishing humanity, nuclear is not enough. It must be cheap nuclear.

Humans are a strange lot. The species is just smart enough to do really stupid stuff. Most of the people who are on the far left of Figure 3 are adamantly anti-nuclear. Or if they have come to reluctantly realize we must have nuclear, they are deeply mistrustful of markets and strongly in favor of NRC-like regulation. They are condemned to the northwest portion of the figure, and intense conflict between economic welfare and CO2 emissions, conflict that could easily tear civilization apart. Sri Lanka was our canary.

Here's the mother of all tragedies. The southwest corner of the figure is available to us. Very cheap, very low CO2 electricity. All we have to do is regulate nuclear power like we regulate other beneficial but potentially hazardous industries, making sure the vendors compete against each other on a level playing field. All we need is Underwriter Certification of nuclear power.

1. Not to be confused with the ratio of installed capacities which will be quite different.