The climate change consensus extends beyond climate scientists

[Vman455]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

I like most of those responses, with my favorite perhaps from Glassman. The worst response was from Kennedy; a statement with no justification.

Sloan's reads like an adult-ified high school ASB election script. Barf. But I agree, Kennedy's was easily the worst.

[oil pan 4]

When the people running your state start to think they need to go into debt to install solar generating capacity it's time to start planning your exit strategy.

[All Darc]

Batteries need energy density for vehicles, even batteries for non electric cars.

Uhn, what if space and weight of batterires wasn't a problem, like for home ?

Why not try to engineer a battery, rechargeable, with very affordable price for high storage capability, using something like chemicals solutions in tanks, like water thanks or small plastic composite pools?
If there is a chemical combination, affordable for recharge batteires, able to recicle, able to use in non xspensive tanks. Periodically the tanks content would be removed for recicled, avoiding polution of suage.

[oil pan 4]

Cheap long lasting, large heavy or low energy batteries have been demonstrated in the lab but as far as I know none have been built and used in the real world.

[freebeard]

Why not try to engineer a battery, rechargeable, with very affordable price for high storage capability, using something like chemicals solutions in tanks, like water thanks or small plastic composite pools?

Why not, indeed.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=flow+cell+battery&t=hi&ia=web

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015...xt-best-device

[NeilBlanchard]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

Hogwash. They aren't being built because of NIMBY and FUD due to the human tendency to be terrible at approaching risk in a rational way. If land based wind were cheaper, my utility would ask if I would like to pay 4 cents less per kWh for "green" energy rather than asking that I pay 4 cents more.

Decommissioning is factored into the price of nuclear plants before construction even begins. The extremely high upfront and decommissioning cost is meant to be amortized over the course of 40 years or more. Fuel and maintenance is extremely cheap beyond these 2 major expenses. The rising cost of nuclear has more to do with irrational fear and NIMBY hurdles than anything else. Storing "waste" isn't a problem, you just store it. The USA has tons of space to store a little fuel. Besides that, today's waste is tomorrow's fuel.



That's 1 plant out of 440 in the world. I'm not up on why they want to decommision the plant, or why it's "losing" money. Normally once a plant is built, the cost is already sunk and you can only make money from there on out. CA wants to decommision a plant due to NIMBY, but it currently produces carbon free electricity at $0.027 /kWh. Somehow those idiots think they are better off building new natural gas plants at a higher cost, than simply continuing to use the plant that is already built.

You might want to look at the facts. The two reactors being built here in the US are wildly over budget and overdue, and the same goes for the reactor being built in the UK.

Pilgrim had FIVE unscheduled shutdowns in about a year - that sort of undependability costs a lot of money. The fund they have to decommission it is $1,000,000,000 dollars, and I'll bet that won't cover the costs, and it won't be done by 2028. The original plan was to take as long as SIXTY YEARS.

The same company Entergy, that owns Pilgrim, also owns Vermont Yankee, and that plant is already being decommissioned - and I doubt they have enough money to do it right.

Nuclear was promised to be too cheap to meter. HA!

[oil pan 4]

These nuclear plants you rag on constantly were probably all designed in the late 1960s to early 1970s by men with slide rules working on paper. These plants were the first attempt at wide scale nuclear power production.

Some of the methods used in construction left a lot to be desired. I know on the maine and VT Yankee plants they explosive welded titanium joints to the reactor cores stainless steel steam out let. This was the source of a lot of problems. This would never be attempted now.
That one pipe coupling was the main reason the maine Yankee plant shut down.
Now when you have to weld up a 1 meter diameter 2 inch thick power plant steam pipe you get a crew of guys to weld on it for a week straight, 24 hours a day till its done, only stopping to x-ray the welds.
Explosive welded joints were supposed to be the future of power plant production saving months of welding time.
That one didn't really pan out.

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

You might want to look at the facts. The two reactors being built here in the US are wildly over budget and overdue, and the same goes for the reactor being built in the UK.

Pilgrim had FIVE unscheduled shutdowns in about a year - that sort of undependability costs a lot of money. The fund they have to decommission it is $1,000,000,000 dollars, and I'll bet that won't cover the costs, and it won't be done by 2028. The original plan was to take as long as SIXTY YEARS.

The same company Entergy, that owns Pilgrim, also owns Vermont Yankee, and that plant is already being decommissioned - and I doubt they have enough money to do it right.

Any project can be mismanaged, and it sounds like this might apply to Pilgrim. Anecdotal evidence is insufficient to draw conclusions for the entire nuclear power industry though. Anecdotes are what politicians use to sway lazy-minded people onto their side.

My (nearly worthless) anecdote is that the latest 2 reactors to go online in the US went way over budget and got delayed for decades due mostly to fear, and yet they are still producing power at roughly 2.4 cents per kWh over the projected 40 year lifespan.

BTW- The Pilgrim plant will have served nearly 50 years by the time it's decommissioned. Not bad considering it was built with a 40 year production in mind. It's easily paid for itself in that time, and I wouldn't be surprised if Massachusetts residents are in for rate hikes. Where are they going to get the energy that has been supplied by the reactor once it goes offline?

[RustyLugNut]

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

You might want to look at the facts. The two reactors being built here in the US are wildly over budget and overdue, and the same goes for the reactor being built in the UK.

Pilgrim had FIVE unscheduled shutdowns in about a year - that sort of undependability costs a lot of money. The fund they have to decommission it is $1,000,000,000 dollars, and I'll bet that won't cover the costs, and it won't be done by 2028. The original plan was to take as long as SIXTY YEARS.

The same company Entergy, that owns Pilgrim, also owns Vermont Yankee, and that plant is already being decommissioned - and I doubt they have enough money to do it right.

Nuclear was promised to be too cheap to meter. HA!

As has been pointed out, regulatory and protestatory hurdles greatly increase costs of nuclear power plants as well as provide a highly uncertain financial situation increasing the costs of financing the project.

I was in MIT a couple years ago to visit with a nephew finishing his doctorates. Several people in the department had some insight on Pilgrim. The added costs were not because of original design failures or dangers. They were the added redundancies required by the powers that be forced by numerous special interests groups after the Fukashima disaster. The shutdowns are largely due to these added redundancies and an increase in the level of scrutiny. At no time was the plant a danger to its operators or the surrounding populace.

So it is with new reactor projects. These projects take decades to build largely because of the bureaucracy and protest. This results in a CUSTOM design for that particular local. Also, once construction is started, the powers that be can halt construction for any number of reasons. Construction halts are very expensive. I was part of a nuclear accelerator project in the 80s and our budget costs increased 50% simply because of the stoppages. Not design changes. Special interest groups in the community wanted more safety from the "nuclear" part of our work. It took numerous public meetings to help them understand that all of our "nuclear" material derived from simply taking the electrons away from our hydrogen gas stream.

The demands of bureaucracy result in custom designs that never are completed on time. This is a norm in the industry and has nothing to do with the actual design and construction of the plant. Should there be oversight? Of course! But there are ways to reduce costs greatly.

The nuclear power industry has the French Nuclear Power grid as a hint to move forward. Largely modular designs with standardized plans for construction and operation as well as fuel reprocessing and sequestration and proliferation security. Protests were allowed BEFORE the start of construction and largely disallowed after. This only makes sense in the scheme of things. The French Nuclear Power Grid is near its heat limit. Meaning, all the large mega-watt plants are on the good cooling sites. This makes sense as current nuclear power plants are only about 30% thermally efficient. However, there was room left in designs to allow co-generation technology to be added once they became viable and economically practical. There are also sites already identified for construction of newer more thermally efficient power plants in the future. All this is a simplification of course, gleaned from an animated Frenchman as we flew across the Atlantic. But, it underlines the fact we can safely and economically build nuclear power into our grids base-lining our renewables if we only had the will.

I am not an opponent of renewable energy. I believe we should use it if and when we can. However, using fossil fuels to largely baseline our renewables is standard practice at the moment. Power storage is going to be a gargantuan task in technology and time. Power transmission is another. Nuclear power can, and does, provide the baseline power a modern society needs.

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by RustyLugNut

Special interest groups in the community wanted more safety from the "nuclear" part of our work. It took numerous public meetings to help them understand that all of our "nuclear" material derived from simply taking the electrons away from our hydrogen gas stream.

The demands of bureaucracy result in custom designs that never are completed on time. This is a norm in the industry and has nothing to do with the actual design and construction of the plant. Should there be oversight? Of course! But there are ways to reduce costs greatly.

I've got the solution to unproductive special interests and public meetings.

Require anyone posing a question or complaint, or demonstrating in protest, to first pass a very basic test proving they at least understand the elementary principles of nuclear power, including a basic test on health effects of various forms of ionizing radiation. If they fail, they are denied asking questions, or otherwise wasting time/money. This means anyone complaining or posing safety concerns will at least have some chance of posing a reasonable question.

Being willfully ignorant is not an excuse to be a pain in the ass for everyone else.