nuclear plants

[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

...70% of all our electricity could come from 10% of Nevada.

And what does covering that large an area do to the environment? You don't know, and neither does anyone else.

northern and central midwest USA and the coasts for wind -- 33% for the whole country of all out electricity could be generated in South Dakota alone.

And what do that many wind turbines do to the environment? You don't know, and neither does anyone else.

coasts for wave and tidal -- the moon is always orbiting the earth, and wind is almost always blowing over some parts of the oceans

And what do those tidal energy systems do to the ocean life? You don't know, and neither does anyone else.

geothermal where it naturally occurs close to the surface or where ever a deep hole is drilled

OK, I'll give you this one :-) It makes perfect sense, where you have appropriate geothermal resources (even if it means I can't go soak in the hot springs up the road 'cause they built a geothermal plant there). Problem is, unless you live in Iceland, there aren't enough geothermal areas.

biomass and biofuels can be done anywhere they are produced -- this can be methane, alcohol, biodiesel, biofuel cells, etc.

Which is fine as long as you're using biomass that would have been waste anyway, but there's not enough of that to come anywhere close to meeting demand. Start growing crops for energy... well, look at the reaction to the little bit of US ethanol production :-) In this case, we DO know what the effects could be, and they're scary. Just consider how large parts of Africa have been deforested by the most basic biofuel use - wood for cooking fires.

heat can be extracted from the ground, or from sewage pipes, or even from composting plant material. Heat and electricity can be gotten from compost and plant trimmings.

Sure, and a lot of those things are worth doing. Add them all together, though, and you still don't get anywhere close to meeting demand without running the risk of serious environmental consequences.

So you want to DEPEND on this mixed bag of sources, with limited efficiency, using unproven technology, and having unknown environmental effects? And all because you're afraid to face a few anti-nuclear superstitions?

[dcb]

Again, what problem are you trying to solve with Nuclear power? And does it really solve anything or will it simply be assimilated?

I have every confidence that we could gobble up the supply of deuterium/tritium in short order with the present mentality, if we did figure out how to use it.

[MazdaMatt]

To whoever wrote that wave gen is a pipe dream, I believe last summer a full scale wave generation plant was opened for operation in... New Zealand? I may be wrong about where, but it is up and running. Waves have incredible power, generated by the moon's gravity... that's big stuff. Can't run the whole world on it, i'm sure, but it is a viable addition to a system.

edit, it was portugal and it was 2008. They have 3 units producing 2.25MW and will be installing 28 more units in 2009 targetting 525MW. I don't know how many people are sustained by a MW, but I imagine it is significant. ZERO pollution. Hopefully they aren't a maintenance nightmare.

[NeilBlanchard]

Hi James,

We had peak oil discoveries in 1961 -- 47 years ago.

We had peak oil production around 1980 -- 28 years ago.

Natural gas will also run out -- and most of it will come from Iran & Russia.

Coal is quite dangerous at many levels, and it is the dirtiest energy source we have, by far.

Nuclear is extremely capital intensive, centralized, high tech way to boil water. The plant that we have poured an enormous amount of money into wears itself out, and needs to be disassembled. Plutonium is extrememly poisonous, and it's half life is ~24,000 years -- it takes at least four half lives for it to come down to a reasonable level of radiation -- so, we need to safely store it for approximately 10X longer than recorded history. The plutonium and all the other radioactive waste needs to be stored in a extremely stable and secure location -- when this problem is solved, come talk to me.

----------------------------

Solar PV can be used on every roof top. This greatly reduces the transmission losses, and it could meet a very large chunk of our needs, since A/C is needed most when the sun is shining. This "democratizes" the production of power, which makes it far more secure, and lowers the risk by several orders of magnitude.

Solar heat can be on every rooftop, too. Vacuum tube collectors are all over China, and many other places, too:


Solar heat and solar PV can be located in the sunniest places and distributed efficiently. It shades the ground underneath the collectors for part of the day. I seriously doubt this is a big problem.

Offshore and land-based wind is spread out as well, and with a good grid, power can be spread around to where it is need, from where it is being produced.

Geothermal can be done anywhere you drill a deep hole. An MIT lab has developed a method of drilling 7-8 miles down -- pump water down there, and you get steam for generators; just like nuclear, but without the radioactive downsides.

Wave and tidal power are real and viable -- there is an Australian company that makes buoys that in small arrays, set up ~10 miles offshore that can continuously generate power. And tidal energy systems are installed in at least three locations around the world -- the moon will keep orbiting around the earth for quite a long time, and the tides will keep moving huge amounts of water back and forth...

There is a 93 unit housing group in England, that is completely self-sufficient for heat and power, and they get everything they need from efficiency, PV on the roof, solar heat collection on the roof, and from composting household waste and the landscaping trimmings.


It takes just 1 1/2 meter length of sewer pipe to produce the heat needed for a house.

[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

Nuclear is extremely capital intensive, centralized, high tech way to boil water.

Yes, it is. But do you think solar is not capital intensive? Current solar panel prices are over $3/watt just for the panels: Cheapest solar panels! Free Solar Panel Price Survey. $3/W solar panels A typical nuclear power plant will generate 1000 megawatts. To get the same generating capacity would cost $3 billion for the panels alone. Now remember that while the nuclear plant is generating 24/7, solar panels only generate full power when the sun is falling directly on them. So you need to double the number of panels to account for night, and double them again if you don't have some sort of (expensive) tracking mechanism to keep them pointed at the sun.

So that's $12 billion just for the solar panels to generate the same amount of electricity as a nuclear plant. Now you have to add in the cost of installation, plus the control electronics (inverters and such), plus some sort of storage so you can have electricity at night... All of a sudden, solar doesn't look so cheap any more :-)

The plant that we have poured an enormous amount of money into wears itself out, and needs to be disassembled.

So you're claiming solar power doesn't wear out, or break, or need maintenance?

Plutonium is extrememly poisonous, and it's half life is ~24,000 years

So are many of the byproducts of solar cell manufacture poisonous, as is the lead &c used to make storage batteries, and they don't HAVE half-lives. Plutonium is relatively easy to separate from spent fuel, and can be used to make more fuel rods. The half-life is not a problem, because it gets "burned up".

The plutonium and all the other radioactive waste needs to be stored in a extremely stable and secure location -- when this problem is solved, come talk to me.

Safe storage of nuclear reactor byproducts was demonstrated about 1.5 billion years ago, at Oklo: Natural nuclear fission reactor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Of course an economic nuclear cycle will reprocess all its wastes into new nuclear fuel, thus eliminating the problem.

And I'm still waiting for you to get back to me on the safe storage of solar photovoltaic waste :-)

Solar PV can be used on every roof top. This greatly reduces the transmission losses, and it could meet a very large chunk of our needs, since A/C is needed most when the sun is shining.

But even simpler is to design houses that don't NEED A/C.

What you don't consider is that residential electric use accounts for only about a third of the total. Sure, most houses could get most or all of their power from solar (and water & space heat, too), and that would be a good thing. That leaves the other two thirds, a lot of which goes to run energy-intensive industrial processes (including the factories that make your solar cells, and the materials that go into them, and the tools that make them...) Then you need reliable baseload generation to keep the grid up & running, so that when Joe's house in Arizona is producing more power than it needs, the excess can be used somewhere else.

Geothermal can be done anywhere you drill a deep hole.

Well, back to the capital-intensive thing again. Just for some ballpark numbers, I found a figure of $150K per 1000 ft for drilling an oil well, so that's about $5.5 million per well. The geothermal plant up the road generates about 100 MW, and has dozens of wells. Assuming sustained generation of 1 MW per well, you'd need 1000 wells to equal one nuclear plant, and there's $5.5 billion just in the drilling costs...

There is a 93 unit housing group in England, that is completely self-sufficient for heat and power, and they get everything they need from efficiency, PV on the roof, solar heat collection on the roof, and from composting household waste and the landscaping trimmings.

But where did the energy come from to build all the equipment they use? That's the real problem. It would be fairly simple (in principle, anyway) to design & build housing that got all its energy from renewables. But where do you get the energy to run the industrial base that makes all the things that go into building these houses?

I apologize for going on at such length, but I want to make a point. You, like many people that advocate purely renewable power, never seem to think through all the implications. You seem to think that your solar panels, geothermal wells, and all the rest are just magically going to appear out of nowhere, at no cost, and that's simply wishful thinking. Making anything has costs: up front and ongoing financial costs, and environmental costs that are often not fully appreciated until you've built so many X-type power systems that the process is irreversable.

Just consider the environmental consequences of hydroelectric dams: did anyone realize beforehand that one consequence of all those dams in the Columbia River basin would be the near-extiction of salmon? Yet that's what's happening.

[Duffman]

Neil, I am not going to rehash what James has said as he covered it pretty well but I will supplement it.

Nuclear is costly?
The Economics of Nuclear Power
Only compared to coal and don’t even talk about solar, it is not in the ballpark.

PV panels are only good for about 20-30 years whereas nuclear plants are 40-60. Wind Turbines do not have an infinite life either.

England is on the warm side of the Atlantic, good portions of China don’t get snow and we have seen how warm Beijing was during the Olympics. Solar is a good technology for certain regions and is terrible in others. Solar power isn’t going to power our industries.

I don’t disagree with what renewables can do but you still seem totally resistant to recognise any of their limitations. Where I live peak demand comes in the winter not the summer. Mid December we get about 8 hours of low intensity sunlight that gives us daily highs averaging -20C. Solar is a total waste of time where I live. When it hits -40C for a week on end, the power must be there when you need it, PERIOD.

As others have pointed out Nuclear puts out less radiation than coal. Obviously radiation is not an issue. Safety is not an issue either. The only legitimate argument that the anti-nuclear crowd can stand on is the waste. Plutonium is a fuel and can be reused. I don’t know if the High school Gym reference stated earlier is correct, but it is not off by more than a factor of ten, which is really small. Like renewable technology, nuclear technology is progressing as well. Look into Breeder reactors and thorium reactors, fission still holds much potential.

Why do you oppose a technology that we have today, that works, is a reasonable cost and has a low environmental impact and doesn’t require us to re-engineer our society to implement it?

[wumpus]

@Cobra Bell

I was well aware of the issue of cooling (what do you think the primary rant of the source was about, and I've dealt with Oklahoma heat: I don't want to try to handle that plus gulf humidity.

The permit hurdles for the wells look nasty. If low power use was popular, it wouldn't be too hard to get developers to dig a few as a utility in a development. Of course, you would need to still be building developments. I was quite irked to see condos going in nearby and *knowing* that nobody would think of doing anything like that.

I got through most of August (but not July) without AC. I think the good people of Maryland can forgo AC if we can roll back one of the worst disasters in US history: AC in DC.

[NeilBlanchard]

Hi guys,

Oil prices will go way up when it gets more scarce, as will natural gas; and I don't think that the supply of uranium is infinite.

I'm not just talking about solar PV. And not all solar PV has the same dangerous materials. Thin film PV roofing is far less energy intensive to make, and the payoff time is only part of the return.

I am including a broad range of renewable energy sources. I encourage you to read the Scientific American proposal called "A Solar Grand Plan":

A Solar Grand Plan: Scientific American

And I encourage you to watch Guy Dauncey's DVD called "The Great Energy Revolution":

http://www.earthfuture.com/publications/default.asp

Another good resource book is "Plan B 3.0" by Lester Brown:
http://www.earth-policy.org/Books/PB3/index.htm
http://www.earth-policy.org/Books/PB3/pb3book.pdf

If you generate electricity locally to where you use it, you only need to produce what you use -- the transmission losses are sometime quite high. Solar heat can be stored efficiently, and as the SA article suggests, other means like compressed air storage underground might be possible.

Wind keeps blowing at night, and if you spread out the turbine over a large enough area, you'll get power all the time; and avoid localized lulls. Offshore winds are pretty darn consistent in many places.

Wave and tidal power is always going to be there.

Methane from sewage (human and animal) and plant waste and trash is a constant we can rely on. This produces a high quality (non-water soluble) nitrogen rich fertilizer, than can replace chemicals that we get from carbon fuels.

Biodiesel from jatophra or algae or soybeans etc. can be developed. Jatophra is a scrub bush that grows on marginal land in drought conditions, and produces oil in a non-edible fruit. Wood alcohol from fast growing willow trees.

Small scale hydro is always possible. Cogeneration within a building is extremely efficient way to make electricity and heat.

-----------------

Nothing is perfect, and there is no single solution. Diversity and distribution are key -- as is efficiency! We could easily cut our energy use in half by efficiency alone.

We need to grow and eat locally grown, organic food -- both because it is much better for you, and tastes much better -- but it also doesn't use natural gas to make fertilizer, and diesel to produce and ship it! An average food item travels 1,500 miles before we eat it -- we think it's bad when fuel gets scarce, but if it also affects out food supply, it'll really get bad.

We also need to cut down on the amount of water we use. Did you know how much electricity is used to pump water up from very deep wells?

Guys, I'm so ready for this discussion -- it is my passion and I am pretty knowledgeable about it. Carbon based fuels are "so yesterday" in terms of their long term availability and their huge effects in the global climate.

And nuclear is a no go for me, too -- if only for the huge security threat of plutonium in the wrong hands. We're messin' with the strong force, and we do not need to! There is a huge excess of renewable energy, just sitting there for us to collect and use.

We have our brains, and we need to use 'em to do the right thing.

[Duffman]

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

Oil prices will go way up when it gets more scarce, as will natural gas; and I don't think that the supply of uranium is infinite .

It’s close to.
World Uranium Reserves

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

If you generate electricity locally to where you use it, you only need to produce what you use -- the transmission losses are sometime quite high.

It’s actually only around 10% and I can link you to my provinces utility report if you want it.

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

Solar heat can be stored efficiently, and as the SA article suggests, other means like compressed air storage underground might be possible.
Nothing is perfect, and there is no single solution. Diversity and distribution are key -- as is efficiency! We could easily cut our energy use in half by efficiency alone.

You talk about efficiency but do you comprehend the efficiency cost of storage? To get electrical energy and convert it to compressed air and then go back to electricity would require 4 conversions, electrical to mechanical, mechanical to compressed air and then reverse the procedure. Good generator and motors are about 90% efficient, I don’t have compressor and air motor efficiencies handy but saying 90% would be generous. 0.9 to the power of 4 is 65% efficient, that is a third of your stored energy lost to the conversion, it’s a bad road to go down before even considering costs.

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

Guys, I'm so ready for this discussion -- it is my passion and I am pretty knowledgeable about it. Carbon based fuels are "so yesterday" in terms of their long term availability and their huge effects in the global climate..

I have done my homework on this issue as well, if you have any questions just ask, I have no problem sharing what I have found.

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

And nuclear is a no go for me, too -- if only for the huge security threat of plutonium in the wrong hands. We're messin' with the strong force, and we do not need to! There is a huge excess of renewable energy, just sitting there for us to collect and use.

It appears you are ideologically opposed to nuclear regardless of any argument we put up here. The purity of fissionable material used for weapons is so much greater than that used in power generation. Any country that wants to pursue a road to nuclear weapons will have them 30 years from now no matter what we do. If isolated N. Korea can do it then anyone with enough determination can. Dumping nuclear power will have no effect on weapons proliferation but we will lose our power source that has the best combination of reliability, cost and carbon footprint.

[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

...I don't think that the supply of uranium is infinite.

What is? The sun's going to burn out one of these days, too :-)

I'm not just talking about solar PV. And not all solar PV has the same dangerous materials. Thin film PV roofing is far less energy intensive to make, and the payoff time is only part of the return.

No, they have different dangerous materials. And it seems that when the solar cells are cheaper to make, they're also less efficient.

If you generate electricity locally to where you use it, you only need to produce what you use...

Big if, there. Lots of times you can't: how do you run e.g. the very energy-intensive processes needed to refine the silicon for solar panels off locally-generated electricity? You're still ignoring the gigantic gulf between "I can build a solar house and live off the grid", and running the whole industrial society that makes the tools & components that go into building that house.

Solar heat can be stored efficiently, and as the SA article suggests, other means like compressed air storage underground might be possible.

No, the heat can't be stored efficiently, unless your criterion of efficiency is a whole lot lower than mine. And while there are a lot of ways to store electricity (high-speed flywheels are my favorite), none of them come for free, and that just adds to the capital cost of your "free" solar power system.

Wind keeps blowing at night, and if you spread out the turbine over a large enough area, you'll get power all the time...

In the process incurring those transmission losses that you were avoiding just a couple of paragraphs back :-) Not to mention that if you pay attention to the weather, you'll find that the wind quite often doesn't blow at night. A usual pattern in many places is for the morning to be calm, with winds picking up into the afternoon and evening, then dying down near dawn.

Wave and tidal power is always going to be there.

Maybe, though it'd be more accurate to say that the waves and tides are always going to be there. Getting power from them is not quite there yet. Even when & if the bugs get worked out of the technology (and we need replacements for fossil fuels NOW, not "someday"), how is it going to affect the environment? What are the side effects of e.g. damming a tidal estuary?

Methane from sewage (human and animal) and plant waste and trash is a constant we can rely on. This produces a high quality (non-water soluble) nitrogen rich fertilizer, than can replace chemicals that we get from carbon fuels.

Sure, but that's only a small fraction of energy use. What do you do for the rest?

Biodiesel from jatophra or algae or soybeans etc. can be developed. Jatophra is a scrub bush that grows on marginal land in drought conditions, and produces oil in a non-edible fruit. Wood alcohol from fast growing willow trees.

Sure, but again, it's only going to produce a small fraction of what's needed, at an unknown cost to the environment.

Small scale hydro is always possible.

But there's only enough of it to generate a small fraction of the electricity needs of the country, and - once again - at an environmental cost.

Nothing is perfect, and there is no single solution. Diversity and distribution are key -- as is efficiency!

Just what I've been saying. Yet you want to leave out one important factor in that diversity, and the one which (because it provides reliable baseload generation to run the grid) allows all the rest to piggyback on it.

We need to grow and eat locally grown, organic food -- both because it is much better for you, and tastes much better -- but it also doesn't use natural gas to make fertilizer, and diesel to produce and ship it!

Which is a fine and good thing if you're lucky enough to live in a small town in say New England or the Midwest, but not exactly practical if you live in midtown Manhattan, downtown LA, or any other major urban area.

Carbon based fuels are "so yesterday" in terms of their long term availability and their huge effects in the global climate.

Err... Has anyone disagreed with that? Not me, that's for sure. It's exactly what I've been saying all along. We need to start getting off of fossil fuels ASAP (we really should have started in the '70s). The problem is that we have a perfectly viable, economic, proven technology that can replace a lot of fossil fuel - certainly all coal-fired electrical generation, for a start - which some people don't want to use because of sheer superstition.