Against Winston Dang (陳重信)

Two pieces in the Timid Times' editorial section today: the first was this attempt at intellectual and moral intimidation by one Winston Dang, a former EPA minister; the second was this piece of subterfuge by John Vidal, chief eco-fascist at the Guardian.*

Winston Dang's piece begins with this:

"For those politicians who think nuclear reactors are so safe that we can cuddle them while we sleep, Tsai’s no-nukes policy is just as scary as any earthquake or nuclear emergency."

It is clear from that sentence alone that Dang has no respect whatsoever for factual analysis of risk or for the people who designed nuclear power stations with extremely high safety standards in mind. Consider this fact-free bit of soundbite scaremongering:

"Following the events in Fukushima, no one in the world dares call himself an expert on nuclear safety, because the old methods of risk assessment and the old ways of considering environmental factors all have to change."

Yes, following the events at Fukushima where radiation leakage has consisted almost entirely of short-chain radioisoptopes that live out their half-lives in a few hours at most - events in which emergency plant workers have only been permmitted to sustain acute radiation doses of up to 250 millisieverts over a day or two (for context, there is some risk of light radiation sickness at temporally acute exposures of 500 to 1000 millisieverts [50 to 100 rem], whilst serious radiation sickness typically requires acute exposures of 1,500 millisieverts [150 rem]; acute exposures of over 4,000 millisieverts would likely result in a 50% mortality rate). I'm not sure on the definition of "acute" exposure, but even if we're talking about just one hour, then the comparison is still absurd: if 500 millisieverts per hour is the minimum dose needed to get light, curable, radiation sickness with some increased risk of cancer, yet the emergency workers at the plant are only being exposed to 250 millisieverts per day, then it becomes clear that the media are deliberately and massively exaggerating the danger resulting from the radiation leakage at Fukushima.

Elsewhere in Dang's article:

"According to data released by the Bureau of Energy (能源局) in December 2009, nuclear plants only contribute 8.7 percent of Taiwan’s total power supply..."

That's deliberately misleading, and I know that because I'm working from the same data; the contribution of nuclear power to electricity production in 2009 was 18.10% - that only drops to 8.7% if you factor in non-electrical forms of energy (i.e. all of road transportation) - but the debate is about industrial-scale electricity production, not the gas you fill your car up with, which not only has nothing to do with nuclear energy but it has nothing to do with renewables, or coal or gas fired plants either. From that same paragraph:

"If the proportion of Taiwan’s total electricity generation derived from renewable sources could be raised from the present 4 percent to 25 percent or more by 2025, there is no reason why Tsai’s plan to phase out nuclear power by that date could not be achieved."

OK let's work with that 25% figure... Total electricity production in 2009 was 229.7 TW hours, 25% of which is about 58 TW hours - that is 18 TW hours (23%) more than the nuclear contribution. For electricity production from renewables to rise from the 4% figure of just over 9 TW hours to 58 TW hours would require a lot of money and land. Let's do the calculations for offshore wind, onshore wind and solar respectively:

For an offshore wind farm to produce 58 TW hours of energy (and here I shall extrapolate from the figures given for the London "Big Array" Turton linked to) would require an area at sea of 3770 square kilometres with a power capacity of 19,400 MW at a capital cost of NT$1.8 trillion dollars. That's a wind farm the size of 14 Taipei Cities - at sea!

For an onshore windfarm (and let's be kind and extrapolate from the figures for the Enercon E-126 turbine, rather than the absurd Roscoe farm in Texas) that would be 2,478 mega-turbines on 398 square kilometres of land at a capital cost just shy of NT$57 billion. That's much better, but it's still an onshore wind farm 40% bigger than Taipei City.

For that figure of 58 TW hours a year to be made up by solar plants (and here let's extrapolate from the figures for the solar plant in Lhuju, Kaohsiung County), the numbers are not going to look good! Taiwan has an average of 1644 hours of sunlight a year - which is 18% of the total number of hours in a year (8760). Using that 18% number for time spent across a year generating electricity at 100% of their power rating (without factoring in for cloud cover which would make the numbers look even worse), such plants would need a combined power rating of 6,600 MW, cover an area of 7,250 square kilometres (or 26.5 Taipei Cities!) and would have to be built at a capital cost of almost NT$9 trillion dollars! That, ladies and gentlemen, is why solar power on this scale would be insane. In light of these calculations - which, dear readers, I invite you to fact-check as I am in no way infallible - consider again Dang's statement:

"If the proportion of Taiwan’s total electricity generation derived from renewable sources could be raised from the present 4 percent to 25 percent or more by 2025, there is no reason why Tsai’s plan to phase out nuclear power by that date could not be achieved."

Oh yes there is Dang - here's three very good reasons:

1) In the case of offshore wind and solar, raising their proportion of total electricity production to 25% using current technology would cost so much money in capital costs alone that it would dwarf the costs of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant at Longmen quite literally by an order of magnitude.

2) In all three cases - offshore wind, solar and onshore wind - raising their proportion of total electricity production to 25% using current technology would require so much land that a Tsai administration really would need to consider some drastic moves, such as (for example) a systematic program of land theft.

3) That 25% proportion of total electricity production in Taiwan could be met far more cheaply in both capital costs and land requirements both by nuclear power and by gas-fired power plants.

Yet Dang didn't stop there. He went on - in the same unbelievable paragraph - to say this:

"It is quite possible that Taiwan could achieve the same goal that US President Barack Obama endorsed two years ago — to generate 100 percent of electricity from renewable sources by 2050."

That is breathtakingly stupid. This guy must never, ever get anywhere near political power again.

*I haven't got time to fisk that piece right now, but I might get onto it later - needless to say though, Vidal is a real nasty piece of work; thyroid cancer is curable, government is not.

Addendum:

Let's assume that, for solar, instead of building solar power plants like the one at Lhuju, a Tsai government instead decides to make it compulsory for solar panels to be installed on every rooftop in each of Taiwan's major cities. Working on that assumption, would it be possible to generate anything like the amount of electricity Dang is talking about? OK well the area values for Taiwan's cities are as follows: Taipei City (273 km2), Tainan City (176km2), Taichung City (163km2), Kaohsiung City (154km2), Keelung City (133km2), Hsinchu City (104km2), Changhua City (65km2), Chiayi City (60km2), Taoyuan City (34km2), Yilan City (29km2), Hualien City (29km2) and let's add an extra 150km2 (30km2 each) for those "cities" for which I can't find figures (Taitung, Pingtung, Nantou, Yunlin and Miaoli)... that's a total of 1,370 square kilometres. That's not much. However, a lot of people do live in Taipei County (Xinbei) and Taipei County is huge (2052km2), but if we add that to our total that still only gives us 3,422 km2 (and remember these values are massively exaggerated since in reality only a fraction of these area values will consist of actual rooftops). To get 58 TW hours a year from solar panels, we'd need more than twice that value (at 7,250 km2); so with the same generous assumptions concerning the operant efficiency of solar panels made earlier (18% and no cloud cover), we'd still only get about 27.3 TW hours a year. That would leave 30.7 TW hours per year to be made up by wind or other renewables. To make up that shortfall via wind would require a wind farm (operating at an average of 30% efficiency) with a 10,500 MW capacity which would require 1,500 Enercon E-126 7 MW turbines over an area of 167 km2 (or about the same size as Taichung City). Madness!