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Solar Today
Sustainable Worldview Column
Super Large-Scale Solar Opportunities
By Michael Totten
Many news columnists and media commentators have taken lately to
recommendingactions for mitigating climate instability driven by
rising levels of greenhouse gasemissions. All too frequently the
message is crafted in a stark contrast, concluding thatsolar
photovoltaics are far too expensive and land expansive, while
nuclear power alreadyis proven as a safe and affordable
climate-friendly option.1
The reporters imply that the publics preference for solar over
nuclear by a 5 to 1 marginis misguided and policymakers should
disregard this nave public sentimentality. This isexactly what
Congress and the Administration are doing in the recurring
energy
legislation, lavishing more subsidies and regulatory relaxation
for revitalizing a moribundnuclear industry while grossly
underfunding the promising opportunities of PV.
For nuclear to displace all coal worldwide by 2100 would require
constructing a 100 MWnuclear reactor every 10 hours for the entire
century! The high nuclear fuel demandwould require reprocessing
plutonium for use in breeder reactors by 2050, resulting insome 5
million kilograms of plutonium, the equivalent of 500,000 atomic
bombs,annually circulating in global commerce. The majority of
these reactors would be sitedin developing countries.2
It is inconceivable in a post 9/11 terrorist-threatened world,
when Homeland Security andU.S. military tax expenditures exceed a
trillion dollars every 30 months, and theAdministration issues
veiled threats to invade Iran over its nuclear reactor program,
thatanyone could advocate power plants that double as military
targets and atom bombfactories.
1 See, for example: Gary Becker, The Nuclear Option, Wall Street
Journal, May 15, 2005; GaryBecker, Nuclear Power: Has its Time Come
(Again)?, May 1, 2005,
www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2005/05/nuclear_power_h.html;
John Ritch, The Key to Our Energy Future, Washington Post, April
26, 2005;Nicholas Kristof, Nukes Are Green,New York Times, April 9,
2005; Thomas Friedman, Geo-Greeningby Example,New York Times, March
27, 2005; and in relation to coal sequestration, Thomas Homer-
Dixon and Friedmann,Coal in a Nice Shade of Green,New York
Times, March 25, 2005; Peter Huber &Mark Mills, Why the U.S.
Needs More Nuclear Power, City Journal, Winter 2005,
www.manhattan-institute.org/; Peter Schwartz and Spencer Reiss, How
clean, green atomic energy can stop global warming,WIRED, Feb.
2005, www.wired.com/; Andrew Oswald & Jim Oswald, The
Arithmetic of RenewableEnergy,Accountancy journal, October 2004;
Richard Meserve, Global Warming and Nuclear Power,Science, V. 3, p.
303, January 23, 2005; Michael McCarthy, 'Lovelock: Only nuclear
power can now haltglobal warming',Independent, May 24, 2004,
www.energybulletin.net/newswire.php?id=320.2 Robert
Williams,Nuclear and Alternative Energy Supply Options for an
Environmentally ConstrainedWorld: A Long-Term Perspective, April
2001, NCI Conference on Nuclear Power and the Spread ofNuclear
Weapons: Can We Have One Without the Other?
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The Solar City Factory, as they call it, is designed to produce
2 to 3.5 GWpeakof solarpanels per year100 times the volume of a
typical, thin-film, solar panel manufacturer in2003, and more than
4 times the volume of the entire solar panel industry in 2003.
As Keshner & Arya summarize, At the price of $1.00 per peak
watt for a complete and
installed system, the payback time in states like California is
under 5 years. Therefore, weexpect the demand for solar energy
systems to explode. With a 30 year lifetime,assuming 6% interest, a
solar farm costing $1.00 per peak watt installed will
generateelectricity at$0.03 per kWh across much of the U.S. There
are technical challenges tobe addressed, but none appears to
require a new invention, but focused R&Dinvestments in these
areas for a few years will be necessary.
And therein lies the crux. Given the historically skewed federal
support for nuclear($169 billion) versus all solar electric
technologies ($5 billion) between 1943 and 1999(in 2005$), the
outpacing of nuclear over solar was not surprising.9 But given a
loomingcentury of violent conflicts, undetectable weapons of mass
destruction carried in suitcases
or triggered remotely via internet, or civilian airplanes
malevolently used, it seemsundeniable that our times call for
superceding such ill-advised atoms for peacecampaigns of decades
past with a PV for Prosperity drive for decades to come. Insteadof
maintaining archaic components of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty that bizarrelypromote nuclear reactors to developing
countries, instead we need a PV Proliferation planactivated
worldwide. It is simply unconscionable not to do so given the
incrediblescientific and technological gains in diverse research
fields offering continuous spilloverknowledge for accelerating PV
learning curves.
Globally, $568 billionper yearwill be investedthrough 2030 to
expand large powerplants (mainly coal and natural gas fueled, and
hydro dams), transmission lines, andremote foreign oil exploration,
extraction and pipelines.
10This expansion is backed by
significant government subsidies exceeding several hundred
billion dollars per year.And the energy-triggered health and
environmental externalities well exceed severalhundred billion
dollars per year. According to a recent review of power
externalitystudies, the mean values of externality cost from coal
(16/kWh) and nuclear (9/kWh)are 16 and 9 times higher than PV
(1/kWh), respectively.11
PV leadership can achieve multiple benefits for humanity for
decades to come eliminating the menacing threats of disruption to
our daily power needs, while offeringclimate protection, cleaner
air and water, all at long-term financially attractive prices.
9 Marshall Goldberg, Federal Energy Subsidies: Not All
Technologies Are Created Equal, RenewableEnergy Policy Project,
July 2000, www.repp.org/.10 Worldwide, meeting projected demand
will entail cumulative investment of some $16 trillion from 2003to
2030, or $568 billion per year. The electricity sector will absorb
the majority of this investment.International Energy Agency, World
Energy Outlook 2004, www.iea.org/.11 Thomas Sundqvist, Power
Generation Choice in the Presence of Environmental Externalities,
DoctoralThesis, Lulea University of Technology, 2002, p. 3,
http://epubl.ltu.se/1402-1544/2002/26/. All monetaryestimates
converted to 2005$.
