Thoughts for April 17, 2022
Good afternoon and Happy Easter. Today’s topics include coal refuse, deep borehole disposal, and the defense budget.
Coal Refuse
This week I am taking a look at waste from various forms of energy production. I discussed solar waste (defunct solar panels) a few months ago. The waste question most likely calls to mind nuclear waste, a topic that, in my opinion, receives an outsized level of public attention. But coal might pose the most difficult waste question of all mainstream energy sources.
Coal waste comes in two forms. Refuse refers to the tailings left over from mining. Coal refuse never enters a power plant (well, it might; more on that in a bit). Coal ash is the waste product that results from burning coal. I’ll stick with refuse for now and maybe address ash later.
All forms of mining result in tailings, or waste material, in addition to the desired product, and coal mining is no exception. It is estimated that each ton of coal produced results in 0.4 tons of refuse. That’s actually a fairly low ratio of refuse. On the other extreme, one ton of gold might result in 200,000 tons of tailings.
Still, coal refuse is nasty stuff. This and this articles outline some negative impacts: vegetation cannot grow on contaminated sites, leading to an unsightly landscape; coal refuse causes water pollution via acid mine drainage; and fires can break out, which are very difficult to extinguish. The Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977, among other things, requires coal miners to establish reclamation plans after the mine is closed, and it establishes the Abandoned Mine Land fund to pay for reclamation, including for mines that closed before 1977. However, it is estimated that there are $12.4 billion of unfunded reclamation costs. So, one question I am trying to figure out is whether the fees paid into the fund are adequate.
With 2021 amendments, the fee schedule is up to 22.4 cents per ton of coal. If the coal is burnt in a power plant with 30% efficiency, this translates to about 0.013 cents/kWh. This contrasts to a levelized cost of coal electricity of about 8 cents/kWh, as estimated by the EIA. How much does it cost to reclaim land from coal refuse? I’ve seen some wildly differing numbers and am a bit confused. More conceptually, is it appropriate to charge today’s coal miners for damages from yesterday’s operations? If not, how should that be paid? It is my understanding also that the AML is distinct from the reclamation bonding that miners are required to put up.
It is also possible to burn coal refuse (as an aside, the author of this article, Sonal Patel, writes on a lot of energy topics and is quite good). Doing so helps solve the refuse problem, but it is still burning coal, with all the air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions that come along with it. This article has some details about how else the reclamation process might be done.
So anyway, I am still a bit confused about refuse, and in particular the adequacy of the post-mining reclamation process. If any readers have helpful insights, I would be greatly appreciative.
Deep Borehole Disposal
Speaking of energy waste and nuclear waste in particular, nuclear waste has become more of a political problem at this point than a technical problem. The United States has been trying to develop a permanent geological storage solution at Yucca Mountain for decades, but that process has been mired in political controversy. An alternative solution is burial in a deep borehole, which is similar in depth and geology to an oil well. If well managed, deep borehole disposal should take care of waste at least as well as shallower geological storage. Furthermore, it is hoped that the political economy will be easier because siting deep boreholes is much more flexible than shallow geologic storage.
Looking into the issue a bit more, I am less optimistic. First off, while deep boreholes should be safe, they need to be more thoroughly tested first. A few years ago, the Department of Energy had a program called the Deep Borehole Field Test, described here, but that program was ended prematurely due to political opposition.
Nevertheless, there is renewed excitement about deep borehole disposal right now due to a company called Deep Isolation, which is working to commercialize the concept. Still, I’m not sure I see a good plan to overcome the political opposition that scuttled the last attempt.
The basic problem with nuclear waste is that it is a problem that opponents of nuclear power don’t want to solve. Rather, they are quite happy to leave the problem unresolved as use it as a cudgel against nuclear power in general. I’m mostly agnostic about how it is solved, since the cost of all serious solutions, including reprocessing, is quite small relative to the cost of electricity. But there will have to be a solution, and figuring this out politically will be necessary for the industry to move forward.
Defense Budget
Noah Smith wrote a piece a few days ago calling for an increased defense budget. The piece is pretty good, and I don’t have any major quibbles with it. Noah makes a few points that I think are worth emphasizing.
Diversification is important, because we can’t predict exactly how warfare will evolve. That means that some defense spending will be unnecessary or on systems that don’t perform well.
Biden’s $813 billion defense budget proposal is an increase, but one that barely keeps up with inflation.
Noah is fairly skeptical of the idea of a labor shortage (notes that real wages have gone down over the last year, the opposite of what we’d expect in a real labor shortage), and in particular that a labor shortage would crimp efforts to increase defense spending.
Our two principle adversaries are Russia and China. The US will have no problem beating the Russians in military might. China is a different story. They have strong manufacturing capacity, a large population, and since they spend about 2% of GDP on defense, there is latent capacity for growth that the US will struggle to match.
The purpose of defense spending is … defense. Not technological spin-offs, employing people, or infusing our otherwise empty lives with meaning.
The future of naval warfare is a good illustrative case of diversification. Strategists have been wondering for some time if cheap ballistics or drones will make aircraft carriers obsolete in the same way that aircraft carriers made battleships obsolete, and they point to the recent sinking of the Russian missile cruiser Moskva as a case in point. I doubt it. Although details remain murky, I’d bet dollars to donuts that it will come to light that the Moskva did not have adequate ballistic defense, or perhaps no ballistic defense at all, fitting with the general pattern of underwhelming performance by the Russian military. By contrast, the US has been developing direct energy defenses, for ships among other purposes, which I expect to breathe new life into naval warfare.
Noah is vague about what specific priorities the Pentagon should focus on, or what the appropriate defense budget would be. I’d like to be able to do that eventually. To that end, War on the Rocks has a write-up on how defense professionals see it. There are more big spenders (24%) who want to spend at least $250B more over 5 years than big cutters (10%) who want to spent at least $250B less over five years. Users of the tool want more focus on great power threats, as opposed to small power threats and counterterrorism as has been the defense focus lately. They also want to prioritize modernization (read: technology and advanced systems) over personnel increases.
Noah is responding to a piece by Matt Yglesias, which also makes a few decent points. Matt questions both whether the strategy and procurement process are efficient. The Pentagon is notoriously inefficient with its spending (e.g. the $10,000 toilet seat), but contracting is a complex process for which I don’t have a good solution, and if there was an easy solution, we’d probably be doing it already.
Matt points out that long-term national security is rooted in national power, which means that economic and population growth should be priorities. It also means getting Human Resources (mainly Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid) expenses under control.
Metaculus projects, as of this writing, that there is a 25% chance of a war between the U.S. and Russia by 2050. Clearly, reducing this likelihood, and preparing for war if it does break out, are high priorities.