Energy Provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act

 

Today, Aug. 16, 2022, President Biden signed into law the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Provisions in this law cover diverse topics like climate, health, and taxes. With $369 billion dollars devoted to climate and energy, this law is single largest action taken by the US Congress to curb the growing threat from climate change. Given how deadlocked the Congress has been these past few years and how many bills were never even voted on, the passage of IRA along strict party lines is nevertheless an achievement worth noting. 

 

Do I like everything in it? No! Could I have passed a better legislation? No! I am just celebrating the enactment of this important law that addresses our climate and energy crisis. Earlier today, I had a conversation with artist and host Michael Killen on his show, The Michael Killen Report, on this topic. A link to it follows a brief discussion of the IRA. 

 

IRA is projected to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 40% from 2005 levels by 2030. That’s 80% of what the larger Build Back Better was projected to achieve. Most of the energy-related provisions focus on electricity. That reflects the growing realization that we need to electrify as much of the society as possible and produce clean electricity to run it. It provides investments and tax credits for a diverse set of energy initiatives covering electrical power generation, transmission and distribution, and consumption.

 

A. Generation

1. Provides $60 B in incentives for installation new clean energy systems—mostly wind and solar. It will lock in investment and production tax credits (ITC and PTC) for the next ten years. By removing this uncertainty of revenues from ITC and PTC, the bill incentivizes businesses to engage in these projects. Leveraged with the private investments, these funds could increase the US renewable energy capacity to 300 GW from its current level of 200 GW.
2. Provides funding through Defense Authorization Act for domestic manufacture of solar panels, off-shore wind turbines, batteries, and critical minerals. Currently, most of the critical materials are manufactured in China.
3. The bill includes PTC for nuclear power companies to keep them open as well as funds for R&D into newer technologies.
4. Extends current tax credits for biofuel and biodiesel for ten years.

 

B. Distribution

1. Modernizes the electrical grid with new interstate high tension transmission lines for greater resiliency.
2. Streamlines the permitting process for easement acquisition to facilitate new transmission and distribution lines.

 

C. Consumption

1. Transportation
• Accelerate adoption of EVs through tax credits to customers of up to $7,500 for new $4,000 for used vehicles.
• Funds for building out a network of 500,000 charging stations.
• Promote electrification of heavy-duty vehicles (trucks, buses, etc.). Includes funding for expanding electrification of USPS vehicles, school buses, and government-owned fleet of vehicles.
2. Commercial Residential
• Provides rebates and tax credits to home-owners for energy audits and retrofits for improving efficiencies (electrical stoves; heat pumps; insulation).
• Includes tax incentives for district energy systems in residential and business communities.
3. Industrial
• Promotes the use of hydrogen for high temp. industrial heating instead for fossil fuels
• Provides tax credits for production of hydrogen with reduced carbon footprint.

 

There are many important provisions to curb ghg emissions, such as capping of abandoned wells and funds for improved agricultural processes, as well as leasing of lands for oil and gas extraction and pipelines. There are also about $10 billion allocated for “climate justice” measures to redress neighborhoods that have been adversely affected by energy industry.

 

Will these actions stop climate change? No; climate change is a global phenomenon, and it will take collective action from all other nations as well. Yet, it is a small step in the right direction. Let’s hope it spurs appropriate actions throughout the globe.

 

Here's the video link. Take a listen.

 

 

Hydrogen: Hope or Hype

 

Headlines declaring hydrogen as the clean fuel for the future are becoming all too frequent. Governments and private companies in Australia, India, China, Germany, Saudi Arabia, and many other countries have announced large projects for producing, storing, and transporting hydrogen. Globally, over 300 projects are being undertaken with investments amounting to $500 billion. India has unveiled plans for producing 5 million tonnes of hydrogen in a bid to become a global export hub.

The promise of hydrogen is that it produces only water when it burns. Thus, using it instead of coal, oil, or natural gas would eliminate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Hydrogen certainly has a role in the net-zero emissions scenarios of tomorrow, for example those proposed by the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC), the International Energy Agency (IEA) and many other organizations. Most scenarios for decarbonization rely on electrifying as much as possible. While the bulk of decarbonization will come from the electrification of home appliances, vehicles, and industries there are many sectors such as metal refining, long-distance trucking, and shipping that are hard to decarbonize with electricity alone and here hydrogen could play a crucial role. But calling it the fuel of the future is a stretch too far. Hydrogen currently represents less than 1% of total global energy and even in the net-zero emissions scenarios it barely increases to 5% by 2050; nowhere near enough to justify the appellation.

Some exaggeration by promoters of any technology is understandable, but when these pronouncements begin to change government policy, it behooves everyone to take a closer look at the contributions hydrogen can make in the future. If the primary reason for using hydrogen is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we must consider the extent to which hydrogen will need to replace fossil fuels and ensure that the hydrogen is produced in ways that do not emit greenhouse gases. This essay will review the ways hydrogen is produced as well as point out the areas where use of hydrogen will be critically important in reducing GHG emissions.

While hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, it is not present as such on Earth. On Earth hydrogen is mostly present in combination with oxygen as water. It is also present in combination with varying amounts of carbon in fossil fuels such as natural gas, oil, and coal, as well as in biomass. Hydrogen can be produced from any of these sources, but the processing will entail energy consumption and/or emission of carbon dioxide. Hydrogen is not a source of energy; it is an energy carrier. In that respect, it resembles electricity–we must expend energy from another source to produce it.

Hydrogen Production. Hydrogen is a widely used industrial gas. About 90 million metric tons are produced each year, equivalent to about 6% of global oil consumption. Most of the hydrogen is used in petroleum refining, and for producing ammonia and methanol. Currently, half of the hydrogen is produced by the reaction of natural gas (methane) with steam in a process known as steam reforming. Analogous reactions with petroleum, coal, or biomass provide most of the remainder. Steam reforming is the cheapest source of hydrogen and is used in petroleum refining operations and for producing ammonia. However, each tonne of hydrogen produced by this process entails producing about 6 tonnes of carbon dioxide, and hence hydrogen produced using current technologies would not be helpful for a transition to a clean future unless the carbon dioxide is captured and sequestered. Technology for carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) is still very expensive and not practiced at anywhere near the required scale.

Hydrogen can also be produced by the electrolysis of water as well–passing electricity through water. The electrolysis process does not entail emission of carbon dioxide, but there could be emissions in producing the electricity. Commercial electrolyzers have an efficiency of 75% and require over 50 MWh of electricity to produce a tonne of hydrogen. Producing one tonne of hydrogen by electrolysis would result in emitting 20 tonnes of carbon dioxide if the electricity was generated by a natural gas power plant and over 50 tonnes if coal was burned to generate the electricity. Either way, it is a situation far worse than with steam reforming!

Colors of Hydrogen. Hydrogen itself is a colorless gas. However, depending on the process used to produce it different colors have been assigned to it to reflect the varying amounts carbon emissions. Indeed, there is full rainbow of hydrogen designations (Figure). Hydrogen produced by fossil fuels has the highest emissions and is labeled black or grey. If carbon-capture is employed in conjunction with such production, the resulting hydrogen is labeled blue. If we use a clean source of electricity to produce hydrogen, it could be a desirable fuel. Indeed, promoters of hydrogen are talking about using wind and solar power to produce what is called green hydrogen. Nuclear power could also be used to produce emissions-free hydrogen; it is referred to as pink hydrogen. Other sources of clean electricity include hydro and geothermal power.

Figure: Colors of hydrogen depending on production technologies.
Source: Global Energy Infrastructure

To produce the 500 million tonnes of hydrogen projected in the net-zero scenarios would require 2,600 TWh of clean electricity, an amount that could be generated from 1,200 GW of wind or solar farms. To put in perspective, current global installed capacity of wind and solar power is only 1,400 GW. The recently announced Adani–Total venture seeks to dedicate 2.3 GW of solar to produce green hydrogen, capable of producing only 10,000 tonnes of hydrogen a year—a tiny fraction of what is needed.

Hydrogen Consumption. One large application of hydrogen is in metals refining. Use of hydrogen instead of coal/coke for reducing iron ore and producing steel has been developed but it is currently being practiced at only a very small scale because the process is more expensive. Expanding hydrogen’s role in metallurgical operations could reduce up to 20% of greenhouse gases, but that would require producing over 200 million tonnes of emissions-free hydrogen.

Transportation contributes to about one third of greenhouse gas emissions and use of hydrogen in this sector would be very impactful. Hydrogen packs far more energy per unit of weight or volume than batteries, but hydrogen has to be contained in a vessel. Because storage vessels must withstand high pressures, they must be constructed from heavy steel or other materials bolstered by reinforced fiber, resulting in increased weight for the overall system. For cars and light duty vehicles, battery EVs outperform hydrogen FC-EV.

There is another reason why fuel-cell EVs have not gained traction whereas battery EVs are rapidly penetrating this sector; it has to do with efficiency. Batteries return around 95% of the electrical energy saved in them. In the case of a fuel-cell vehicle we lose 30% of the energy in first producing hydrogen from electricity, and then another 35% in the regenerating electricity using the fuel cell, for a combined efficiency of 45%. Increasing the efficiencies of electrolyzers and fuel cells could allow FC-EVs to gain market share in this sector. Until then they will remain a minor player.

The chief drawback of battery EVs is their relatively lower capacity and slow recharging. For long-distance trucking and other heavy-duty applications where large amounts of on-board energy needs to be stored, hydrogen fuel cells technology becomes attractive. Storing compressed hydrogen becomes more practical in large vehicles and ships.

Hydrogen, like batteries, is a way of storing electricity. If electric power is generated at times when there is low demand, it makes sense to store it—put it in a bank if you like. However, there are substantial energy losses both during conversion of electricity to hydrogen (30%) and regeneration of electricity from hydrogen (40%). The situation is akin to a bank that charges you a 30% fee to deposit money and again charges you a 40% fee during withdrawal! You must be desperate to save money in such a bank. For this reason, schemes to produce hydrogen at wind and solar facilities to ameliorate the problem of intermittency makes limited sense. It would be far better to use the excess electricity directly for water treatment, desalination, or whatever else the local region may need.

My Guest Coulmn in Corporate Tycoons, May 2022

 

Video Links

 

In the past couple of years, I have given quite a few talks and recorded several interviews advocating for nuclear power to mitigate the climate crisis. A number of these are available on YouTube, and I provide links to them here.

Talks	Time (min)
Keynote address at the Fossil and Renewable Energy Conference; it makes a succinct case for nuclear power.	25
Discussion with a group of retired scientists: Science for the Bored	110
ENFL Division of Am. Chem Soc.; Monthly Invited Talk Series	86
Talk organized by KKBioTech, India	100

 

Interviews on Killen Reports	Time (min)
Effects of Climate Change and Solutions	25
Meaning of Net Zero	17
Building EV Charging Network	14
Opportunities for building an Advanced Electric Grid	28
President Biden’s Energy Initiatives	29

 

The Downside of Opposing Nuclear Power

 

A dear friend recently expressed his strong opposition to nuclear power. When I asked him about his reasons for opposing nuclear power, he cited the amount of low-level radiation from nuclear power plants and suggested that I read Dr. John W. Gofman’s book, An Irreverent Illustrated View of Nuclear Power. Dr. Gofman’s early research was in nuclear physics. He worked on the Manhattan Project. Later, he became a professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California in Berkeley. The book, published in 1979, is a collection of his lectures and essays opposing development of nuclear power.

 

After reading Dr. Gofman’s book, I realized why anyone who believed his analysis, would be strongly opposed to nuclear power. He writes convincingly. Gofman’s opposition stems from two main arguments: (1) radiation leakage is inevitable, and all radiation is potentially lethal; and (2) nuclear power is not needed, because the amount of energy that could be obtained from the limited supply of uranium can easily be sourced by other means including co-generation (i.e., producing steam for heating while also generating electricity). I have refuted both these lines of reasoning in my book and my blog. I will briefly reiterate my reasonings here, starting with the second.

 

Gofman’s argument about the limited amount of energy possible from nuclear power holds only for the light water reactor designs that use barely 5% of the potential energy from the fuel rods before they are replaced. In fact, with reprocessing and breeder reactors, energy from nuclear fission can suffice to serve all humanities needs for centuries. Should nuclear fusion become a reality the amount of realizable energy is virtually limitless. The world clearly needs a whole lot more carbon-free energy than can be garnered from expedients like co-generation (which are not carbon-free).

 

Gofman bases his antinuclear arguments in what is known as the linear no-threshold hypothesis (LNT). LNT was postulated by Prof. Herman Muller in 1927 based on the mutagenic effect of radiation and the resultant possible cancers. He got the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1946 for that work. In his speech at the award ceremony, he articulated the LNT hypothesis, “that mutation frequency is directly and simply proportional to the dose of irradiation applied and that there is no threshold dose.” The context is important as it was shortly after the horrific bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Many scientists pleaded with the governments to cease from developing atomic weapons. They were also troubled by the atmospheric testing of the weapons and the fallout thereof. Muller’s finding of radiation induced mutagenesis, coupled with the fact that we do not know which mutation may tip the cell over to becoming cancerous, provided a rationale for LNT. LNT further posits that all effects of radiation are cumulative.

 

Note that all this happened prior to elucidation of the structure of DNA by Watson and Crick in 1953, nor the subsequent advances in our understanding of how our body copes with DNA ruptures. The LNT hypothesis has been thoroughly debunked and yet, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission continues to impose strict limits on radiation exposure from nuclear power plants to 1 mSv/year, one-third of natural background radiation! We now know that in humans, DNA damage arises naturally about 10,000 times per cell per day! Almost all of them are successfully repaired by the body. Biology is truly amazing! It evolved under the stress of radiation. 

 

Living on earth exposes us to over a 100-times the radiation from a functioning nuclear power plant. Natural radiation levels on average are about 3 mSv/year, and people living at higher altitudes and atop granite rocks receive substantially higher doses. Background radiation in Denver is 10 mSv/yr, but epidemiological studies have not shown people there to have a higher incidence of cancer. In addition to this background radiation, people are routinely exposed to larger amounts of radiation from medical procedures such as chest and dental X-rays, CT-scans, and when traveling by air.

 

In 2014, the UN body studying the biological effects of radiation issued a statement saying it “no longer recommend(s) multiplying very low doses by large numbers of individuals to estimate numbers of radiation-induced health effects within a population exposed to incremental doses at levels equivalent to or lower than natural background levels." Studies on the fatalities and possible cancers arising from nuclear power plant exposures over the last 70 years show that it has the best record of all energy systems. Even if we include 4000 fatalities from Chernobyl as predicted by LNT (actual number is around 50), nuclear power results on average 0.04 deaths per TWh of electricity generated as compared to 160 deaths per TWh for coal. Please see my blogpost about why I favor nuclear power and another one dealing with some common objections I have heard during my presentations.

 

By adhering to LNT and strict radiation exposure standards, we have unduly instilled a fear of nuclear power in the general public and made nuclear power unnecessarily expensive. As a direct consequence of that many more coal and other fossil fuel plants were installed. Our response to the fear of radiation has caused many more fatalities. The same result was seen in Fukushima. Fear of radiation prompted the unnecessary evacuation of several hundred thousand people and resulted in over 2000 fatalities from stress and mental anguish. Radiation exposure did not cause a single death.

 

Gofman uses powerful rhetoric. He calls potential deaths from radiation as “random murders,” and he repeats it over and over again to evoke a visceral response. By his logic, he and others opposed to nuclear power are guilty of more murders as their stance led society to use a more deadly technology! Furthermore, Gofman tells the public to not believe anyone who denies LNT as they are lying. He calls them “sycophants of the elite and powerful.” With statements like that, he basically shuts down any opportunity for a meaningful discussion. No wonder, my friend does not want to engage with me on this subject.

 

Towards the end of his book, Gofman writes about the billions of energy impoverished people. Yet, he never addresses their need for energy, nor how that could be provided. The human cost of energy poverty is enormous in terms of infant mortality, malnutrition, premature deaths, and lost human potential. Currently, 17,000 children die every day from causes attributable to energy poverty. Let that number sink in. It is comparable to the number of people who perished from the Tsunami that hit Northern Japan in 2011. Imagine now, a similar tsunami striking every day and selectively taking the lives of children under the age of five. Between 1980 and 2005, China lifted 600 million people out of abject poverty while simultaneously reducing infant mortality rate from over 2,000 per day to under 700. This achievement was a result of increasing energy production four-fold, albeit that was mostly from increased use of coal and oil. Nevertheless, the importance of energy in bettering the lives of humans cannot be overstated. If you haven’t seen this 10-minute video by Prof. Rosling, please make time to watch it.

 

Open Letter to Secretary Kerry

 

Congratulations on being picked to be the Czar for Climate in President-elect Biden’s administration. I heard you speak about your role on a couple of different news shows and am pleased to note that you recognize the shortcomings of the Paris Agreement.

The only effective solution that scientists like James Hansen are telling us to embrace, is nuclear power. Nuclear power is the one source of clean energy that is scalable to the levels needed. It is also the has safest record (fewest fatalities per TWh generated) and the smallest environmental footprint, both in terms of area covered and tonnage of commodity materials required per unit of electricity delivered. Yet, our current policies such as subsidies and portfolio standards, and the manner in which electricity is marketed is making nuclear power uncompetitive. The unfounded fear of radiation and years of anti-nuclear misinformation has placed such strict and expensive standards on the nuclear power plants that they are being priced out. In many states even fully functioning nuclear power plants are being shuttered. We have a shortfall of clean electricity, and we are digging ourselves deeper in the hole!

As climate Czar, I hope you will address the market distortions that are at the root of the nuclear power plant closures. Instead of closing them down, we should be extending clean energy credits to them, support their expansion, and invest in demonstration of newer walk-away safe nuclear power plant designs.

Getting the public to embrace nuclear power presents a formidable challenge. Public opposition to nuclear power has its origin in the debunked idea that there is no safe dosage of radiation, and the improper application of the LNT (linear, no threshold) hypothesis to estimate cancer in large populations exposed to low levels of radiation. Without public acceptance of nuclear power, we have no chance to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 or curbing the devastating effects of climate change. What is urgently needed is a sustained public education and outreach program that undoes the decades of anti-nuclear fear mongering. An office of energy education and public outreach dispelling the fear of nuclear power. There are trade-offs with all energy systems, but the benefits from nuclear power far outweigh the risks.

Good luck to you in your new role!

Respectfully,

Ripudaman Malhotra, PhD
Fellow, American Chemical Society
cmo-ripu.blogspot.com

A New Life for Spent Nuclear Fuel

 

My friends at EnerChemTek, a Toronto-based consulting company, recently brought to my attention a technology by a company called Infinite Power for harnessing the energy from the radioactive decay of a strontium[1] isotope, ⁹⁰Sr. (Infinite? Immediately, my skepticism goes on high alert!) The company’s website promotes the technology, which was invented by scientists at the University of New South Wales, as a solution to global energy crisis. It promises abundant (almost inexhaustible) source of inexpensive clean (i.e., carbon-free) electricity that can power the world! My curiosity was piqued.

 

If true, and it is a big IF, the claims by Infinite Power would constitute a giant step forward for the power-hungry planet. To be sure, deployment of any technology at global scale takes decades, but having a scalable clean technology is a step in the right direction. 

 

Devices for harnessing energy from decaying radioisotopes are often referred to as nuclear batteries, although they are not electrochemical cells. Such batteries produce electricity through various processes: thermoelectric, thermionic, or photovoltaic. Radioisotope thermoelectric generators of RTGs have been used for long duration space exploration missions. Cassini and Galileo probes were powered by a plutonium oxide RTG. The device described by Infinite Power is different and falls under the category of a photoelectric nuclear battery. It uses the electromagnetic emissions resulting from the radioactive decay to produce electricity with photovoltaic (PV) materials.

 

There were not many details about the technology on the company’s website, which is understandable. After all, if the company is sitting on a gold mine, they would not want to disclose all their secrets. They do mention the basis of their technology, which is that they have fabricated “hardened PV cells” to produce electricity from the radiation emanating from radioactive strontium. The “hardening” allows these PV cells to capture and convert even high energy radiation, exposure to which degrades the garden-variety PV cells. 

 

⁹⁰Sr has a half-life of 28.3 years and thus it would take a century for its radioactivity to subside to less than a tenth its original intensity. ⁹⁰Sr decays by emitting a beta-particle (an electron) and forms ⁹⁰Y, an isotope of yttrium. In turn, the daughter ⁹⁰Y decays by another  beta-emission to stable ⁹⁰Zr, zirconium. ⁹⁰Y is extremely radioactive and has a half-life of only 64 hours. The energy of emitted b-particles from ⁹⁰Sr and ⁹⁰Y are 0.5 and 2.5 MeV (million electron-volts). Combined, the energy from the radioactive decay of the two isotopes amounts to about 3 MeV. Not all of this energy could be converted to electricity, but this figure places an absolute limit to what is realizable. So how much energy does that represent? How many cubic miles of oil? Or how many TWh of electricity could possibly be generated by this source? 

 

To answer these questions, we need to know (i) how much ⁹⁰Sr is available—the resource potential, (ii) how the energy of the emitted particles is transformed into electromagnetic radiation, and (iii) the fraction of that energy that is captured by the “hardened PV device,” and finally convert the MeVs into kWh or other commonly used units of electrical energy.

 

⁹⁰Sr is not present in natural strontium, but it is present in the spent nuclear fuel. Nuclear power plants have been operating commercially since 1956 when the Calder Hall plant in England began operation. This was a small facility, only 50 MW of capacity; since then, over 400 nuclear power plants have been built and the global installed nuclear capacity has ramped up to over 350 GW. A typical 1-GW nuclear plant generates about 25 to 30 tons of spent fuel each year. While about a third of the spent fuel is being reprocessed in countries like France, Russia, Japan, and the United Kingdom, most of the spent fuel is stored in dry casks at the power plants. The World Nuclear Association estimates the global stockpile of spent nuclear fuel in 2013 to be 250,000 tonnes (metric tons).[2] Isotopes of uranium and plutonium comprise over 95% of the spent fuel. The amount of ⁹⁰Sr in the spent fuel is on the order of 1%, for a total of 2,500 tonnes. At 3 MeV per decay, the total energy amounts to 2,230 TWh.[3] While 2,230 TWh is a lot of energy (potentially worth over $100 billion), it is less than a tenth of annual global electricity consumption. In 2018 alone, the world consumed 26,000 TWh of electricity. 

 

Clearly, the technology is not the “(a)nswer to climate change” as proclaimed by Infinite Power. However, the fact that I do not know enough about their technology and could be missing a big factor, I am not inclined to simply dismiss their claims mere corporate hype. This technology can still be a significant component of a broader portfolio of clean technologies. As described, the technology is highly modular and lends itself to addressing energy needs under a wide range of situations, such as powering remote villages, industries, and charging stops for electric vehicles, including trucks. There are probably many applications for which this nuclear battery would be particularly suited and therefore be of interest to investors and technology developers.

 

In this analysis I have assumed that the entire inventory of Sr in the spent fuels is accessible. While methods for chemical extraction of Sr from spent fuel have been developed—for example, the Idaho National Lab has published a processes for extracting almost 100% of ⁹⁰Sr from the spent fuel with dilute nitric acid—access to the spent fuel will likely present several jurisdictional barriers, and thus limit the overall supply. Reprocessing has been banned in the USA since 1976. Furthermore, a major factor in the cost of the extraction process will be the implementation of safety protocols for handling radioactive materials.

 

Another important consideration would be the fraction of energy from the decay that could be converted into electric power. I reviewed a patent underlying the company’s technology, but it was very light on details. It says that their technology as being able to use high energy photons from the decay. As mentioned above, ⁹⁰Sr and ⁹⁰Y both decay by emitting high energy electrons. The emitted electrons can cause excitation of electrons in other atoms, which would then emit photons that could excite electrons in a PV cell to produce electricity. However, the patent gives no idea of the spectrum of the radiation from their ⁹⁰Sr source nor the bandwidth of the PV material. Such information would be essential for determining the fraction of the total available energy that can be realized as electric power. 

 

All in all, I find this technology extremely intriguing and hope that further R&D is conducted to answer some of the questions before the technology is advanced to commercialization.

 

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[1] Strontium has chemical properties similar to calcium and is situated right below it in the periodic table. Natural strontium is not radioactive and non-toxic. However, certain isotopes of Sr that are formed during nuclear fission of uranium are radioactive. Although the b-emissions are readily blocked and can penetrate only about 1 cm through the skin, the chemical similarity of strontium and calcium allows ⁹⁰Sr to get incorporated in the bones, where it can do damage and thus potentially cause cancer.

[2] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/nuclear-wastes/radioactive-wastes-myths-and-realities.aspx

[3] One eV is the energy released one a charge of a single electron drops by 1 Volt. It is equal to 4.45 x 10^-23  Wh. To obtain an estimate of a gram mole of eV we multiply the 4.45 x 10^-23  Wh by the Avogadro’s number, 6.02 x 10^-23 , to get 26.8 Wh. The 2,000 tonnes of ⁹⁰Sr correspond to 22.2 million g-moles. Multiplying the moles of ⁹⁰Sr with the amount of energy per eV, and then multiplying that with 3 x 10⁶  (for 3 MeV per decay) I get 1,800 TWh as the energy released from decaying ⁹⁰Sr and its daughter ⁹⁰Y.