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.
Interesting and incredible analysis. Having worked across the energy industry, there are ways to reliably cut the cost of nuclear, and the Navy Nuclear program has done that. We just have to have the minds and openness to go down that path.
I expect the social cost of carbon to be low but I am still very motivated to unlock nuclear. If the SCC is low that means the next highest cost of warming is policy that assumes it's very high.
Circa 2015 there had been no statistically significant surface warming for the entire lives of high school graduates. Not only did they not know, they were having climate nightmares. The shadow SCC - the social cost of carbon policy - means that we need affordable nuclear full stop.
I agree completely that the argument for cheap nuclear does not depend on the Social Cost of Carbon. Nuclear's insane energy density means it could be and should be cheap. Cheaper than coal. We have a responsibility to provide that cheap power to all the world's poor, regardless of the SCC. We must find a way to do that.
Having said that, each of us has our own personal probability density on the SCC, if only implicitly. Mine like yours has a peak that is at the low end of the GKG range. But it has a fat upper tail. This means I have to ask the what-if question? I think we all do.
I could have added the context that it's chosen an indicator of what direction and magnitude the narrative component of people's perceptions of warming consequences are. Currently twitter is a boiling kettle of people agonizing about these last few unusually warm years, which I believe bring our warming trendline from below the average of model predictions to above. This has happened once or twice before and then dropped back under. At the 2015 mark the trendline very nearly broke below the 95% confidence interval of expected warming for the models of that time. The perception multiplier is enormous.
WHATEVER one wants, "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."
I am uncomfortable with using the SCC for making non-micro decisions. I think that conceptually one needs rather the trajectory of the optimal tax on net CO2 emissions. There is a relation, but I don't think they are the same thing.
Not following. The basic trade off is CO2 emissions versus grid cost. Varying the price on CO2 emissions is the obvious way to draw forth that trade off. Some people (eg MIT) prefer setting a constraint on CO2 emissions and then varying the level of that constraint. That strikes me as artificial but, if you go that route, consider the SCC as the Lagrange multiplier of the emissions constraint. The end result is the same as long as you vary the constraint level over a wide enough range, which is often not done.
A CO2 tax is a related but different issue as you say. At least in theory, It requires that society agree on the SCC. The GKG Grid model does not require any such agreement. Nor does it make any assumptions about what the SCC is.
The GKG Model was inspired by and builds on the Ruhnau/Qvist model. (Econstor, 2021-10) Ruhnau ran his model on Germany. It was natural that we compare our results with his. The fact that Germany has made such a large commitment to Renewables also made it the obvious first choice.
Interesting and incredible analysis. Having worked across the energy industry, there are ways to reliably cut the cost of nuclear, and the Navy Nuclear program has done that. We just have to have the minds and openness to go down that path.
Patsy Baynard, PhD, Independent Consultant
I expect the social cost of carbon to be low but I am still very motivated to unlock nuclear. If the SCC is low that means the next highest cost of warming is policy that assumes it's very high.
Circa 2015 there had been no statistically significant surface warming for the entire lives of high school graduates. Not only did they not know, they were having climate nightmares. The shadow SCC - the social cost of carbon policy - means that we need affordable nuclear full stop.
Smope,
I agree completely that the argument for cheap nuclear does not depend on the Social Cost of Carbon. Nuclear's insane energy density means it could be and should be cheap. Cheaper than coal. We have a responsibility to provide that cheap power to all the world's poor, regardless of the SCC. We must find a way to do that.
Having said that, each of us has our own personal probability density on the SCC, if only implicitly. Mine like yours has a peak that is at the low end of the GKG range. But it has a fat upper tail. This means I have to ask the what-if question? I think we all do.
Didn't you cherry-pick there, in that said high-school graduates were likely born in the abnormally warm year of 1998?
I could have added the context that it's chosen an indicator of what direction and magnitude the narrative component of people's perceptions of warming consequences are. Currently twitter is a boiling kettle of people agonizing about these last few unusually warm years, which I believe bring our warming trendline from below the average of model predictions to above. This has happened once or twice before and then dropped back under. At the 2015 mark the trendline very nearly broke below the 95% confidence interval of expected warming for the models of that time. The perception multiplier is enormous.
WHATEVER one wants, "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."
I am uncomfortable with using the SCC for making non-micro decisions. I think that conceptually one needs rather the trajectory of the optimal tax on net CO2 emissions. There is a relation, but I don't think they are the same thing.
Thomas,
Not following. The basic trade off is CO2 emissions versus grid cost. Varying the price on CO2 emissions is the obvious way to draw forth that trade off. Some people (eg MIT) prefer setting a constraint on CO2 emissions and then varying the level of that constraint. That strikes me as artificial but, if you go that route, consider the SCC as the Lagrange multiplier of the emissions constraint. The end result is the same as long as you vary the constraint level over a wide enough range, which is often not done.
A CO2 tax is a related but different issue as you say. At least in theory, It requires that society agree on the SCC. The GKG Grid model does not require any such agreement. Nor does it make any assumptions about what the SCC is.
Why did you choose Germany as the country on which you would run your GKG Grid Model?
George,
The GKG Model was inspired by and builds on the Ruhnau/Qvist model. (Econstor, 2021-10) Ruhnau ran his model on Germany. It was natural that we compare our results with his. The fact that Germany has made such a large commitment to Renewables also made it the obvious first choice.