$15 billion. Get used to that number because you’re going to hear it a lot in energy circles. That’s the amount of money that many say the U.S. should be putting into energy R&D each year.
Monday night, in Google’ swanky San Francisco office, the company hosted an event on energy innovation with a slate of heavy hitters including Lynn Orr, head of Stanford’s Precourt Energy Institute, Berkeley’s Dan Kammen, MIT’s Ernie Moniz, and Google’s Dan Reicher. Venture capitalist Tim Woodward of Nth Power ably moderated.
Few groups have more or broader experience with energy innovation issues than these guys and they were all in agreement on the R&D funding increase and even the $15 billion annual number. A couple interesting funding mechanisms for clean energy R&D were discussed, too, including a very small “line charge” on electricity sold, which would send money into a pool for R&D. Apparently, a similar system worked for natural gas. (Random historical footnote: the money was managed through a non-profit called the Gas Research Institute, which apparently was wildly successful. It’s now called the Gas Technology Institute.)
I also loved this quote from Kammen because it’s true: “The markets for energy need to reflect the values we want, not the ones we inherited.” It’s hard to find a better summary of the problems of technological momentum. The way we make, sell, and buy power were all passed down to us and it takes a lot of work to think of new ways of doing things.
A few other bits from my notes.
- There was one noticeable flashpoint. While all voiced half-hearted to full-throated support for nuclear power, in the press briefing preceding the event, Dan Kammen said that he’d heard that the cost and timeline of a new nuclear plant is running $10 billion and 100 months. Moniz cut in, saying, “I’m going to have to disagree with that.” And they had a brief jab contest on how long actual plants might take to build before returning to their corners.
- Kammen is heading a group within the IPCC that will release a report on renewable energy that, as he emphasized over and over, will contain the first “zero carbon scenarios for 2030 and 2040.”
- Moniz — and others — warned that most of the new energy funding came from the stimulus package, and that after the next year and a half, there was a danger of energy R&D falling off a cliff. This happened, of course, in the 1980s and was very destructive.
- Google’s Reicher was the most specific. The Googlers have coined a new phrase to describe their approach: Lightbulb to Lightbulb. That is, government needs to help from the new idea to the actual product. He pushed enhanced geothermal, solar thermal, and off-shore wind for the East Coast of the U.S. He pushed for a Federal renewable portfolio standard and — intriguingly — repeatedly voiced support for the Clean Energy Deployment Administration. In fact, he noted that deployment should be one of the government’s key roles. Keep in mind, this is a major reversal from Reagan’s renewables policy.
- All of the panelists said they spent a lot of time in China and were heartened by recent climate negotiations between Beijing and Washington. Kammen called them “increasingly intertwined and nuanced.” Moniz predicted that what we’d see out of Copenhagen was an agreement between developed and developing countries on technological cooperation
- I asked Moniz about what kind of nuclear reactors he expected to see in the future, if any. He said, “If nuclear is going to expand, it’s going to be light water reactors.” He said it’d be decades before we saw new nuclear plant designs (like the Internet-favorite, liquid flouride thorium reactor).
- Kammen called Art Rosenfeld, “the father of energy efficiency.” Which is nice. He was the progenitor of California’s landmark energy efficiency regulations, which have kept the state’s energy needs far below what was once projected.
- Undersecretary of Energy Kristina Johnson’s presentation was a bit underwhelming. They beamed her in from Washington, D.C., and I think the technology setup was bad. Still, she could have delivered a slightly less safe and bureaucratic talk.
Thanks for posting the write-up. Seems like an interesting event, and I really hope the $15bn fund is realised. Compared to the US war machine, it’s really not a lot of money. I can’t help but feel that delivering renewable energy solutions rather than JDAMs to Afghanistan would be more helpful in terms of stabilising the country and engendering a good future relationship.
Can’t help but comment on the whole nuclear thing. If new nuclear is a good idea, why are Google investing in innovative and existing renewable energy technologies rather than nuclear? I’m with Google.
Thanks for the recap. Very helpful. In a presentation I have prepared, which I hope to make part of a longer research paper, I sadly come to the conclusion that the world is going to burn through alot more coal either before, or concurrently with any energy transition to clean energy.
Best,
G
While I appreciate the desperate need I think I’d rather budget $5 billion for three years and avoid the dropoff that would orphan projects…
@Stuart: They are thinking $15 billion a year for at least a decade!
Far less than $15B for one year would be all the money that it would take to develop liquid-fluoride thorium reactors that would produce ALL the energy we need for the next few hundred thousand years. I can’t believe the opportunity costs represented by “renewable” energy. They’re squandering monies that could succeed if applied in other directions.
I briefed Reicher in Manchester, England, before the Manchester Report panel. I saw him again at Google in July briefly. I know he’s heard the LFTR story and my friends at Google told me that he asked the NEI about it, but that they were dismissive. I also know that Dr. Moniz heard the story because he was in the room when I briefed Jim Hansen’s workshop in November 2008 in DC. There is a cadre at Google trying to move LFTR forward but they’re not aligned with Reicher’s group.
“Far less than $15B for one year would be all the money that it would take to develop liquid-fluoride thorium reactors that would produce ALL the energy we need for the next few hundred thousand years.”
I find this really, really hard to believe. Moniz and Kammen seemed to agree on the $10 billion number for ONE light water reactor. It seems like a stretch to suggest that $15 billion would be enough to run LFTR through the development phase and to a commercial product.
You said in another post that you agreed that light water reactors would dominate for decades. If it would really take “far less” than $15 billion to commercialize LFTR, how is it possible that no one will invest $15 billion in the next 10 years for what is (in your view) a vastly superior technology? What do they know that you don’t? Or what do you know that the rest of the world doesn’t?
I don’t pose these questions as a criticism… I’m genuinely curious about the technology.
“I find this really, really hard to believe. Moniz and Kammen seemed to agree on the $10 billion number for ONE light water reactor. It seems like a stretch to suggest that $15 billion would be enough to run LFTR through the development phase and to a commercial product.”
From what you’ve written, you’re not entirely ignorant of the advantages of LFTR technology–you’ve even linked to my website. In that case, you already know about 1) deep inherent safety features, 2) no fuel fabrication expenses, 3) much smaller plant footprint and resources commitment, 4) reduced fuel demand, 5) higher energy generation efficiency, 6) reduced cooling demand and potential for air-cooling, 7) generation of co-products like desalinated water and synthetic hydrocarbons, 8) generation and sale of medical life-saving isotopes like Mo-99, 9) potential for smaller sizes and modular construction, 10) potential for mobile deployments, and many others.
“You said in another post that you agreed that light water reactors would dominate for decades. If it would really take “far less” than $15 billion to commercialize LFTR, how is it possible that no one will invest $15 billion in the next 10 years for what is (in your view) a vastly superior technology? What do they know that you don’t? Or what do you know that the rest of the world doesn’t?”
Since I don’t see any investment in LFTR currently, I can only agree with Dr. Moniz that we will have LWRs for decades. But that could change. At the rate we’re going now, LFTR will never be developed. But that could change, and indeed I work on the assumption that it will. Everything I know about LFTR I’m trying to tell as many people as possible. And from the response I see online, they’re getting excited about it just like I did when I found out. For example, I found this today and I had nothing to do with its organization:
http://www.reddit.com/r/thoriumreactor/
You ask, how is it possible that no one will invest $15B in the next ten years? Mr. Madrigal, I think if you stop and think for a moment you will find your own answer to that question. When has any organization with those kind of riches invested in the technology that makes its current operations obsolete?
I believe the LFTR idea has legs. I am an advanced R&D engineer. I regularly refuse to make accurate predictions about how much something will cost to design. The nature of two-year R&D is that, if it really matters what the cost is, to within a factor of two, then you can’t afford it.
Barrying some catastrophe that galvanizes a public mandate for a new and better nuke (and let’s pray we don’t see such a thing), one gigawatt LFTR powerplants are 15 years away from going online, at best. This is unfortunate but it is reality.
The nature of 15-year R&D is that, if it really matters what the cost is, to within an order of magnitude, then you can’t afford it.
Now I happen to believe that it doesn’t matter if it costs $15B or $150B to design a mature, reproducible LFTR. If we are going to build 1000 of these things in the US, which is what were really talking about if we’re going to take all the coal offline and stop oil imports, then $150B would come to $150M per plant (present dollars), which is a significant cost adder, but one that I suspect will be crushed by the huge savings that come from the miniaturization and environmental isolation of the LFTR plant.
My confidence in LFTR being a good investment is further bolstered because I suspect there will be a $xxx billion per year economic advantage to deriving our energy inputs from primarily domestic labor rather than foreign property rights. That advantage accrues to anything which displaces imported oil… but I don’t see that anything else can. In particular, not efficiency improvements stimulated by carbon taxes.
My opinion should be discounted somewhat, because I am an R&D engineer and people like me (not me exactly, because I don’t work on nuclear stuff) stand to benefit from spending in this area. You should also be cautious of what VCs have to say about public policy, as they can’t usually avoid a similar conflict of interest.
Kirk is not alone in thinking LFTR is the best way forward. This idea was Alvin Wienberg’s favorite reactor (Dr. Wienberg was head of the Oak Ridge National Labs for 18 years, fostered the research that led the LWRs, co-authored the first Nuclear Reactor textbook, etc.). Other well known supporters include Dr. Ralph Moir and Dr. Edward Teller.
There was a competition between the liquid metal breeder reactors and LFTR back in the Nixon days and LFTR lost the political battle.
The nuclear power industry moves VERY cautiously. What the rest of the world “knows” is that the nuclear power industry has been dormant for many years and if we move at the pace of recent decades it will take many decades for LFTR to come to fruition. This isn’t a timeline suitable to investors. On the other hand, the original prototype went from a specific idea to operating reactor in about 5 years.
I would agree with less than $15B – what is perhaps more relevant is that the proposed budgets from ORNL to bring the technology to fruition were substantially under $15B (in today’s dollars). The estimates for development costs depend very strongly on how ambitious one is. The estimates for production units are consistently below LWR’s. Cost estimates at this stage of development are going to be pretty rough though.
The phrase “for one year” should have been dropped from the quotation. We can not get it done that fast.
I claim that this technology has a lot of promise – it is not ready for commercial development yet but it is very much worthy of significant investment to execute the remaining R&D to make it commercially feasible. Each day we spend almost $1B on importing oil. If we spent half of one days’ oil import each year on R&D for LFTR we would make a lot of progress. Within 5 years I believe we would a have working prototype and research results to remove the uncertainties that hold us back. In another 5 years we could be in commercial production.
I know 10 years sounds like a long time – but I recall the “energy crisis” from 1974 – 35 years ago. It will only get worse going forward. Large scale infrastructure projects do take time.
Other benefits from the technology is that it can consume the worst of the existing spent fuel waste (the actinides) reducing that problem by 100-fold. It can readily consume any excess weapons grade material. Once a reactor is started it does not need any uranium enrichment services. It reduces mining more than 100x compared to LWR’s and much much more than 100x compared to coal.
@Lars: I am a big Weinberg fan. Of all the nuclear advocates I’ve ever read, he grasped the social issues of the technology the best. He also had that sense of time that you seem to, too. It seems like his minimum time unit was about 5 years and he tried to think in centuries. Have you read his book, “The Life and Times of a Technological Fixer”? It’s great. And it was Weinberg who once wrote that, in the end, our energy options come down to the sun and radioactive isotopes.
What are the uncertainties in the LFTR? I can’t remember all the specifics around the experiments that were done with the molten salt reactors back then. But there’s certainly nothing in my view of technology that would lead me to believe that the best reactor won the race to commercialization. In fact, I think the history supports the idea that light water happened because of a series of circumstances unrelated to the inherent merits of the reactor design for civilian, commercial power.
A very good primer article on LFTR technology is here: http://www.energyfromthorium.com/pdf/NAT_MSREexperience.pdf
@USPWR_RO: Thanks! That’s the kind of document I was looking for.
Alexis, you nailed one of the key consensus points of the Google event (which I also attended). More in this column on the strong and growing consensus on the need for a big scale up in federal clean energy R&D investment, with the experts zeroing in on a $15 billion per year as the key figure:
“The Innovation Consensus: $15 Billion for Clean Energy R&D”
The voices at Google’s event are joined by leading think tanks, a collection of the nation’s top universities and research centers, and dozens of Nobel-prize winning researchers in calling for at least $15b per year in new clean energy R&D spending.
At the Breakthrough Institute, we will continue to organize voices pushing for this critical investment in clean energy R&D throughout 2010. Stay tuned…