Thread: nuclear plants
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Old 09-28-2008, 03:51 AM   #48 (permalink)
Duffman
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I don’t think the numbers are off by much. Energy and Electricity values will be different. 17,408TWh/year would make sense for electricity if total energy was 29,000. I don’t think it really matters if the numbers are out by a factor of 2x, its when you approach 10x that it is significant.

Canada generated 570TWh in 2003 for 30 million people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electri...ctor_in_Canada

According to my utility document provided above we generated 20.5 TWh for only 1 million people. That report is an annual financial report for the corporation, its numbers have to be accurate because it is fraud to report otherwise.

I am sure line losses can approach 30% if you push enough power down a line. Average line losses for my provincial utility were 10% and again it is in the financial report so it is an accurate number. I did some more poking around on the internet and found this:
http://www.suezenergyresources.com/O...sses091905.pdf

Again all are 10% or well under.

I am not sure where you are going with your last article on costs. $/W of capacity doesn’t mean much without considering duty cycles. Fuel costs for nuclear are negligible wrt the capital investment. My attachment is taken from:
The Economics of Nuclear Power

Links with solar are hard to find but this one has them included and they are terrible.
On Global Warming: Is nuclear power carbon-free?

Its easy for some Phd author to take Wh/year totals from strong generating sites and say we only need so many units to power our nation or planet. Its purely theoretical! It entirely ignores the fact that the strong sites are clustered geographically, duty cycles are 20-30% but additionally can be strong or weak based on time of day or month of the year, but change day to day but overall is not predicatable in the long term. This is a serious engineering problem/challenge, not a 7th grade math question.

Again, my question was what is a suitable energy strategy for the province of Saskatchewan?
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Last edited by Duffman; 09-28-2008 at 04:09 AM..
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