The most popular form of renewable energy by far is wind generation. Supposedly, wind generation is competitive with other forms of power generation. However, wind generation does not really substitute for other power sources at all. This is due to its miserably low capacity factor. According to information supplied by the Energy Information Administration, the capacity factor of wind generated electricity in the state of California during 1999 was 23.7% and 26.0% in 2000. It seems totally appropriate to use these figures from California as being typical of wind generation in general, since California has the largest installed wind generated capacity of any state, and has operated its wind generation facilities for many years. Indeed, one could justly claim that California pioneered large-scale electricity generation from wind.

Now, it is true that some wind generators, at ideal windy sites, have capacity factors as high as 40%. However, if presidential candidate John Kerry’s proposal were adopted to require 20% of U. S. electricity to be generated by renewable resources, then so many less than ideal sites would need to be pressed into service, that to achieve an average capacity factor of 26% by wind generation would be a remarkable achievement.

The problem with these low capacity factors is that some other form of electrical energy generation must usually supply the missing generation, and in the United States that supply is most likely to come from a fossil fuel fired power plant. That was certainly the case in California during the California electricity crisis. Due to the Western drought, California had to replace inexpensive hydroelectric generation with expensive fossil fuel generation because renewable energy could not cover the shortfall. However, it is not generally realized that California’s investment in wind generation actually made the California electricity crisis far worse than it needed to be.

Electrical production from wind generation is highly variable. It varies with the cube of the speed of the wind. Indeed, below a certain wind speed, called the cut-in speed, the wind generator does not produce any electricity at all. Typically, the cut-in speed is approximately 10 mph. Consequently, wind generators spend a great deal of time producing no power. In addition, they only produce their rated capacity when the wind speed is well above the average speed of the wind at the site. This is why their overall capacity factors are so low. For this reason, other electrical generators must extensively cycle their power output to compensate for the variation in the output of the wind generation.

Operating a fossil fuel fired power plant in the cyclic mode, instead of operating at a constant power, has two very detrimental effects. First of all, cycling makes the power plant much less efficient. It must consume more fossil fuel to produce the same electrical output. Second, cycling produces thermal stresses that over time will cause material failures that will force the power plant to shut down to make repairs.

The failures produced by cycling is one of the reasons that has influenced most power plant operators to choose a power plant design that is relatively inefficient when they need to operate the plant in the cyclic mode. A simple combustion turbine is typically 40% efficient. A combined cycle power plant that includes a combustion turbine, a heat recovery steam generator, and a steam turbine, is typically 58% efficient. However, the combustion turbine is less likely to fail due to the thermal stresses induced by cycling.

The other major reason that a power plant operator would choose the inefficient combustion turbine over the efficient combined cycle is that the combustion turbine costs less to install. The power plant operator must operate his combined cycle generator longer than the combustion turbine to recover his investment. If he is forced to shut down or reduce power to make room on the electrical grid for a wind generator, he may never recover his investment.

Consequently, there are very compelling technical and financial reasons to choose a simple combustion turbine that is only 40% efficient if the power plant is forced to cycle because of the operation of a wind generator on the same electrical grid. Using the 26.0% wind capacity factor from California in 2000, one can calculate the amount of fossil fuel required to operate a combustion turbine for 74.0% of the time in order to replace the missing power from the wind generator, and compare it to the amount of fossil fuel required to operate a 58% efficient combined cycle power plant 100% of the time. The more efficient combined cycle can now be used since it does not have to vary its output to accommodate the wind generator. The result is that the combination of wind generator and combustion turbine uses 7.2% more fossil fuel than the combined cycle. That’s right. The introduction of the wind generator causes more fossil fuel to be burned not less. That means more pollution, not less. That means more carbon dioxide emitted into the Earth’s atmosphere, not less. That means more dependence on imported fossil fuels, not less. That means that wind generation is a fraud. That means that renewable energy is a fraud. That means that the taxpayers of the United States, who are currently subsidizing wind generation to the tune of 18$ per megawatt hour of generation, are being ripped off. That means that John Kerry’s proposal is totally detrimental. It is an extremely expensive means to create more pollution and burn more fossil fuel.

The detrimental effect of wind generation can be even worse, if the threat of being forced to vary their output causes additional power producers to select simple combustion turbines, instead of the more efficient combined cycles. This certainly was the case in California during the 1990s. Not a single large-scale combined cycle power plant was constructed in California in the decade before its electricity crisis. What this means is, that during its electricity crisis, California consumed huge amounts of natural gas in order to supply its consumers with electricity. Since the price of natural gas was outrageously high at the time, the inefficiency of its gas fired power plants cost California consumers billions of dollars. California would have been much better off if it had never built any wind generators, and invested its money in combined cycle generators.

To make matters even worse, California failed to install the required pollution control equipment on many of its fossil fuel fired power plants before it sold them to independent operators during the restructuring of its electricity market. The only way that these plants could operate, beyond a very limited number of hours, was to pay very expensive environmental fines. However, these plants were required to operate in order to avoid electrical blackouts, and the ratepayers ended up paying these fines. This also cost California ratepayers billions of dollars. California would have been better off if it had taken the money it had invested in wind generation, and invested it in pollution control equipment of its fossil fuel fired power plants.

The experience of California clearly shows that investment in wind generation is a very foolish investment. The money would be much better spent on improving power plant efficiency, or on advanced pollution controls. However, the most foolish thing that California did to its electricity supply was to shut down two nuclear power plants, Rancho Seco and San Onofre Unit 1. The average capacity factor of the nuclear power plants in the United States in 2002 was 92%, and the average has been consistently close to 90% in recent years. Note that the capacity factors of nuclear power plants are much greater than for wind generation. If these two nuclear power plants would have been available during the California electricity crisis, and if their capacity factors were at least 90%, then California ratepayers would have saved at least three billion dollars. Also, nuclear power plants emit virtually no air pollution, so California’s air would have been cleaner, since unlike wind generation, nuclear power’s high capacity factor means that it needs significantly less support from fossil fuel fired power plants. However, what would make the decision to close the Rancho Seco plant so extraordinarily foolish is that the city of Sacramento, which owned Rancho Seco, spent over four hundred million dollars in today’s dollars to make improvements to Rancho Seco just before it decided to decommission the plant. That’s right. The city of Sacramento threw away over four hundred million dollars in order not to have the capacity of a reliable and clean electrical power source available. As events were to show, that was a most unfortunate decision.

Of course, the usual argument against operating nuclear power plants is that they produce “deadly” nuclear waste. In actual fact, waste from nuclear power plants in the United States has never killed any member of the general public. The nuclear waste is isolated from the environment and the probability is extremely low that it will ever escape. The fact that is consistently overlooked by anti-nuclear advocates is that the uranium fuel that the nuclear power plants use is dangerously radioactive in its own right, and using the uranium in nuclear reactors removes this radioactive danger from the environment.

The main radioactive danger of uranium is that it is at the start of a radioactive decay chain that includes radioactive nuclides that are extremely dangerous. Radium-226 is one of uranium’s radioactive daughters. It is a well-known carcinogen. It is interesting to compare radium-226 with plutonium-239, which is almost always cited by anti-nuclear activists as being such a dangerous component of spent reactor fuel. Radium-226 is at least one million times more dangerous than plutonium-239. This is due to the fact that the most likely pathway into the human body of either nuclide is via the alimentary canal, and that plutoniun-239 is likely to be excreted long before it decays. However, radium is chemically similar to calcium and a major fraction of it is retained within the body. Consequently, it is much more likely that the radium will release its cancer causing alpha particle where it will do the most harm.

Radium decays to radon gas whose health dangers have been widely reported. Radon-222 decays to polonium-218. Polonium-218 decays to lead-214. Lead-214 decays to bismuth-214. Bismuth-214 decays to polonium-214. Polunium-214 decays to lead-210. Lead-210 decays to polonium-210. Every one of these nuclides is radioactive. Every one of these nuclides can release a cancer causing radioactive dose to human cells. Polonium is typically referred to as being 250 billion times more toxic that hydrocyanic acid. Hydrocyanic acid is one of the most lethal chemical poisons. Obviously, polonium is so toxic that it would only be common sense to keep it away from human beings. However, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration stand idly by while massive amounts of uranium and all of its radioactive daughters are introduced into human beings.

Phosphate is used in massive amounts as a fertilizer and an animal feed supplement. Unfortunately, all commercial phosphate deposits are contaminated with uranium and its radioactive daughters. Consequently, agricultural practices are introducing naturally occurring radioactivity into virtually the entire population of the United States.

The radioactive dose to smokers caused by natural radioactivity is well documented. The Fredericksburg Free-Lance Star reported in its July 14, 2002 issue that a smoker, smoking 30 cigarettes a day, receives a dose of 16,000 millirems a year. A worker in a nuclear power plant is limited by federal regulation to less than 5000 millirems a year and very few workers ever get close to the dose limit. Consequently, smokers are receiving very large cancer causing doses from natural radioactivity. The theory is that radium in the soil decays to radon gas, which drifts upward underneath the canopy of tobacco leaves. When the radon decays, its radioactive daughters stick to the waxy tobacco leaves. Much of the radium in soil comes from the application of contaminated phosphate fertilizer.

To illustrate just how much greater this naturally occurring radioactive dose is than any dose expected from the operation of nuclear power plants, a smoker in a Las Vegas casino will get a greater radioactive dose in two days, than a resident of Las Vegas will get in a lifetime from the operation of the Yucca Mountain radioactive waste depository. Approximately 150,000 smoking related cancer deaths occur each year in the United States. Removing uranium and its radioactive daughters from phosphate fertilizer and animal feed supplements would certainly reduce this number of deaths. Some writers have speculated that 90% of all smoking related cancers are due to the radioactivity in the tobacco smoke. If removing uranium and its radioactive daughters from phosphates prevented only one-third of these cancers, that would save 50,000 lives a year. That seems to be a very worthwhile goal and it could be done. Indeed, on a limited scale in the recent past it was done. From 1950 to 2000, some phosphate producers did remove uranium and its radioactive daughters from their products to supply uranium to power nuclear reactors and to provide uranium for nuclear weapons. However, after Three Mile Island, the demand for uranium plunged and uranium prices fell. Phosphate producers could no longer make a profit extracting uranium from phosphate ore so they left it in their products.

If phosphate producers were encouraged to remove the uranium and its daughters from their products, not only would that save some smokers’ lives, but also the uranium could be used to fuel nuclear reactors. This would require a substantial expansion of the use of nuclear power to make this economical. However, such an expansion could save tens of thousands of additional lives by preventing millions of tons of pollution from fossil fuel fired power plants. Nuclear reactors, due to their high capacity factors, can actually replace fossil fuel fired power plants, unlike renewable energy, which actually requires greater dependence on fossil fuels.

However, the greatest benefit of removing uranium and its radioactive daughters from phosphate containing products could very well be the reduction of radioactivity from food. Radium is very similar chemically to calcium. Any plant that absorbs calcium from the soil will also absorb radium. Animals and humans will then absorb the radium for their bones, teeth, and brains. Lead is also chemically similar to calcium. Consequently, uranium’s radioactive lead daughters will also be concentrated in animals and humans. However, the Environmental Protection Agency thoroughly discounts the danger from radioactivity in food. I think that the EPA has seriously underestimated the danger.

Since 1980, the breast cancer rate in American women has more than doubled. There is every reason to believe that this is due to an environmental cause. However, the Environmental Protection Agency has not been able to identify the cause. Perhaps, the agency has overlooked the obvious. The skyrocketing increase in breast cancers correlates very well with the increasing use of phosphates in fertilizer and in animal feed. Also, it was during this time period that some phosphate producers stopped removing uranium and its radioactive daughters from their products. The higher rate of breast cancer in American women when compared to the rest of the world could be explained by the fact that phosphates are more extensively used in the United States than anywhere else in the world.

If radioactivity in food is a serious threat, then it is responsible not only for the increase in breast cancer but also the increase in many other cancer rates. There are approximately 400,000 non-smoking related cancer deaths each year in the United States. If removing the radioactivity from phosphate products prevented just one-fourth of these deaths, that would save approximately 100,000 lives a year.

There are only two attitudes preventing the United States from adopting a pro-nuclear electricity production strategy. One is anti-nuclear hysteria. Anti-nuclear hysteria has exaggerated the fear of nuclear power to outlandish proportions while completely ignoring the threat of natural radioactivity. The adoption of nuclear power could substantially lower that threat by promoting the removal of naturally occurring radioactivity from phosphate containing products. The other attitude preventing the adoption of a pro-nuclear stance is renewable energy. However, renewable energy is a complete fraud that actually harms the environment and leads to the consumption of more fossil fuel than if “renewable” energy had never been invented.

Rodney Adams
6.15.04

Interesting article. There is an old saying - "One man's cost is another man's revenue."

When energy intensive industries and consumers pay high costs for natural gas, oil and electricity, there is very naturally a group of natural gas suppliers, oil companies and independent power generators that are quite happily banking large revenue increases.

Your detailed description of the relationship between windmills and natural gas consumption may explain why there are so many natural gas and oil companies with interests in windmill companies and especially with wind industry trade associations and lobby groups.

They get a large return on their investment, not by the revenues directly generated from producing power with the wind, but by protecting and even enhancing the revenues produced by selling gas.

Those same companies work very hard to discourage nuclear plant developments and often take the path of completely dismissing them as potential competitors.

The difference is that nuclear plants operating at a reasonable 75-95% capacity factor represents a real loss of market share and a direct loss of revenue to the fossil industry.

Right now, even after a 35 year hiatus in ordering nuclear plants, they produce the equivalent of about 3.5 million barrels of oil per day inside the US and more than 12 million barrels per day world wide.

Imagine what the price of oil would be if we had continued to build the plants!

Rod Adams www.atomicinsights.com

Christopher Powers
6.15.04

I found your article ill informed. In fact, very much so. Your facts about wind seem carefully chosen to prove your point and you do so, but only by either intentionally ignoring or missing other information that would show your conclusions to be incorrect. But, beyond that, I'm not sure I understand why you think of renewables as the enemy of nuclear. I've worked on both sides of the house and support both. Both have pluses and minuses. Both are going to be important for the world in the long run. Your dismissal of wind, and by extrapolation all renewables, reminds me a bit of those who dismissed the horseless carriage, the television and the Beatles as short-term fads. If you'd like more information on what is really happening with wind and other renewables and wish to take the time to learn, I'll be happy to set something up.

Chris Powers U. S. Department of Energy

Rodney Adams
6.15.04

The first half of your article was great. However, it seems in the second half that you fully support the theory of Linear, No Threshold (LNT) damage due to radiation exposure.

Have you ever reviewed some of the large volume of literature that questions this theory based on numerous detailed studies?

I highly recommend a few visits to Radiation, Science and Health http://cnts.wpi.edu/rsh/

Please read some of the information about the demonstrated effects of low levels of radiation exposure and consider publishing a revision to your published material that points to radiation as a significant source of human health risk.

Thank you.

Rod Adams www.atomicinsights.com

Rodney Adams
6.15.04

Wind is definitely no competitor for nuclear power, but the public FALSE perception that wind, solar or other renewables will be our salvation from fossil fuels is definitely a deterrent to nuclear developments.

At best renewables are diffuse, unreliable, often dirty, generally expensive (unless HEAVILY subsidized) and have yet to made any significant inroads into actual fossil fuel consumption. This despite the fact that all official "renewable" sources of energy have been known to humans for hundreds to thousands of years.

Rod Adams www.atomicinsights.com

There are more interesting point-counter-points on this question.  To read more please visit:

http://www.energypulse.net/centers/article/article_display.cfm?a_id=758