Everyone is talking about that stupid town that voted against solar energy because it would suck up the energy of the sun. So I read the story from the local paper, and hey, it wasn’t as stupid as it was made out to be, and there are actually valid arguments against solar farms.
I’m entirely in favor of more wind and solar power, but let’s not pretend there are no problems with them. The residents of Woodland, NC brought up real concerns.
Mary Hobbs has been living in Woodland for 50 years and said she has watched it slowly becoming a ghost town with no job opportunities for young people.
She said her home is surrounded by solar farms and is no longer worth its value because of those facilities.
She added that the only people profiting are the landowners who sell their land, the solar companies, and the electrical companies.
A solar farm can have a huge footprint, and is a rather passive contributor to a community. Try to imagine living in a place where large amounts of real estate are dedicated to just soaking in sunlight and turning it into electricity — that does not sound very lively or exciting, and it does have a cost to the community. I live in a place where a lot of acreage is committed to collecting solar energy and turning it into corn, and we have that same problem with young people seeing no reason to stay here.
And this next bit is a real worry:
Jane Mann said she is a local native and is concerned about the plants that make the community beautiful.
She is a retired Northampton science teacher and is concerned that photosynthesis, which depends upon sunlight, would not happen and would keep the plants from growing. She said she has observed areas near solar panels where the plants are brown and dead because they did not get enough sunlight.
You’re putting up giant panels to block sunlight from reaching the ground. Of course plants are brown and dead underneath them. Why shouldn’t you have reservations about a facility that’s going to be the equivalent of a giant parking lot to local plant and animal life?
You might argue that the next question is approaching goofiness, though.
She also questioned the high number of cancer deaths in the area, saying no one could tell her that solar panels didn’t cause cancer.
“I want to know what’s going to happen,” she said. “I want information. Enough is enough. I don’t see the profit for the town.
Except, again, there is a real reason for worry. Solar panels do contain metallic toxins and carcinogens, although it’s going to be a much bigger problem where they are manufactured. This is a case where I’m not going to laugh at someone asking the question.
The next bit seems to be generating the greatest hilarity. But it also has a less loony interpretation.
Bobby Mann said he watched communities dry up when I-95 came along and warned that would happen to Woodland because of the solar farms.
“You’re killing your town,” he said. “All the young people are going to move out.”
He said the solar farms would suck up all the energy from the sun and businesses would not come to Woodland.
Yeah, I kind of suspect he’s talking about how committing large amounts of land to a solar farm would suck the energy out of the town. And it’s true: a representative from the solar farm basically told the town that it wouldn’t cost them anything, but it also wouldn’t bring in much. All the town would get is $7000 a year for training the fire department to handle potential emergencies out at the big collection of silicon and metal. And then the town voted to deny them a zoning change to build it.
I’d like to see more solar energy, but let’s recognize that it’s not without ecological consequences, and especially if you’re buying up fallow land that has other utility and other potential, it’s not crazy for a place to decide that maybe it’s in their best long term interests.
I’m not just being a luddite (usually I’m the opposite). But it is fair to point out that solar is going to have huge land use concerns, isn’t going to bring much revenue to a community, has the potential to be a source of toxins, and isn’t exactly an attraction to make the place better for residents.
Wind farms also have ecological consequences. We shouldn’t let the benefits blind us to the problems.
Scale down and use surfaces that are already covered, like rooftops. Or car parks.
Wind farms are more common here, but solar farms as described would be disastrous for wild life.
Rooftop and parking lot solar is the way to go. Here in Brazil they are tearing down pristine semi-arid forest to set up wind farms, it kind of defeats the purpose of setting up wind farms. Business as usual.
(This is off-topic, sorry…)
Poopyhead, You probably need to be aware of this (if you aren’t already), Drone owners get Christmas surprise from FAA: you will have to register to fly: “New rules mean all drones over 0.55lb must register with national database […]”.
Like a lot of people I laughed at the article when I saw it, but it’s nice to know small-town America isn’t quite as stupid as that.
Thanks for writing this one. I saw everyone hur-huring at how stupid these people must be, but I have read valid criticisms of just turning huge areas into solar farms (I think Chris wrote about it, correct?). I live in wind-farm territory, and while the cheap energy is great, there are some issues. The roads get clogged up with the massive slow moving parts, the blinky lights annoy people, some birds get killed, I guess? But mostly cheap energy. I’ll be more interested to see what they do with the aging machines in 50 years when they start breaking.
Do we know if that’s feasible? All I can find with a brief google search are some blog posts pointing out economic fairness and fire risk issues, but I’d be interested to see any papers on whether large scale solar plants are avoidable in a carbon neutral world.
The solution to the latter at least is straightforward: give the local community complete or partial ownership, hence revenue. Standard with windfarms in Denmark, for example.
it is interesting a new tech is developed and the way we try to utilize it is just to plug it into an aging distribution model and structure.
that model has significant losses built do in large part by long power lines. There are systems built out here in the dessert where it is sunny most of the time hence a dessert but it is also a long way from the large market of users requiring long transmission lines.
The most difficult thing to do and the most efficient thing to do would be to redesign the existing distribution system to a more distributed system and use all the various generative sources including the use of improved storage capacity all closer to the end user demand.
The only thing we need to do is overcome the inertia of the entrenched tax subsidized monopoly existing industry.
piece of cake right?
uncle frogy
That was my first thought when I read the solar farm’s rep’s reply: they’re giving virtually nothing back to the community at all. They want the land zoned so they can put up this farm, offer $7K for fire training (which had me wondering…solar farms can catch fire? Then what?).
My impression wasn’t so much that the town had a bunch of silly objections, but that the council wanted to know what’s in it for them, and the answer is diddly squat…so they said no.
The news article didn’t present that Mann had any argument behind her JAQs, only her bold assertions. At least they published some responses, that solar panels only use the sunlight that hits them (can’t suck up nearby light), and no toxic chemicals are evident (to cause cancer nor brown vegetation).
While it “nice” to learn that Mann is retired, it remains frustrating that she taught several generations her poor thinking skills.
Giliell “Scale down and use surfaces that are already covered, like rooftops.”
Back in the UK my 92-year-old Mum got solar on her roof when they were giving really good returns to promote it. One of the best investments she’s done: free electricity and an average of a couple of hundred quid evey 3 months!
Thanks for posting this clarification of the questions the townspeople were actually asking. It does look like a more complex issue than a superficial reading gives.
Using existing surfaces sounds like a good idea.
@10
Your comment about an ‘aging, inefficient grid system’ is partly correct; but simply moving everythign to the point of consumption isn’t feasible, because : consumption is never even, and rarely in balance with local production. It’s not just a matter of ‘entrenched tax subsidized existing industry’.
Go completely off grid and see how much stuff you have to a) replace and b) do without.
The power grid is a very useful thing; it enables us to shift energy to places that need it quickly and, yes, efficiently.
If a local-only source is over subscribed, you only have a choice of turning it off for some customers. Ask the residents of Bagdad about what happens when there’s not enough energy produced locally (when we ‘eliminated their entrenched and tax-subsidized inefficient grid’ for them in our Glorious Neocon Iraqi Adventure: they ended up with power for only a few hours a day.
Try to imagine living in a place where large amounts of real estate are dedicated to just soaking in sunlight and turning it into electricity — that does not sound very lively or exciting, and it does have a cost to the community.
Yeah, golf courses are so much better.
It’s true that they may not be giving much back to the community… but I still find the “they’re killing our town” comments a bit much. They may not be _resurrecting_ your town, because they don’t bring much to it. But they’d have to be actively taking something away to be killing your town. Are they driving up the price of real-estate, so no one can afford to live there? I could certainly believe that, but I don’t see anyone making that claim. Instead they’re saying “businesses won’t come here now” – well, were they before? Because if not, then it doesn’t seem like solar farms are the problem; even if they also aren’t the solution.
When I drive into the desert and see a golf course it makes me ill. It is disgusting. I’d much rather see the desert! That said, I think the roof-top/parking lot coverage sounds better than just using large tracts of land.
Kinda agreeing with #16/17 a bit, though: if the town is dying, it was dying before the solar farms came in: they moved in BECAUSE the land was cheaply available. The town was, like many rural towns, already failing by globalization and American corporate economic policy. Kids stay where there are jobs. Housing values stay up where there are jobs.
That the farms aren’t creating jobs, I can respect. At least in Alaska, everybody gets a cut of the oil profits.
That nobody else was, either, is still something the town would have had to deal with even without the farms. It was blaming the farms but NOT acknowledging other aspects that some of us had a problem with in reading the newspaper summaries.
An issue with rooftop parking lots is the relationship of the parking lot to 1) the sun and 2) any building taller than the parking lot’s roof. While it is meant to absorb sunlight, it will, just like any glass building, reflect it as well. It could create blinding light and significant heat to the nearby buildings, which can use more energy than they collect in air conditioning increases in the summer time.
Disney can use this at Animal Kingdom because there are no tall buildings nearby. Similarly, it could work for a lot of grocery stores and malls because most are only 2 stories tall, not enough to be in the angle of reflection.
A 6-story office or government building, which many small towns have, may be an issue in that regard.
I have to admit, when I first read, “the residents of Woodland,” I was thinking of Hazel and Fiver.
Shut up – I am too a grownup!
There are, obviously, a lot of downsides to nearly anything. Solar farms do take up a lot of space, no doubt about that. I wonder how their footprint matches up to the footprint of a conventional power station, though? I’m guessing they take up more space per unit generated, but significantly so? I’m not sure.
These are real and legitimate concerns, but I don’t think many of them apply more to solar farms than to any other large development project or high tech construction. Build a shopping mall, and a lot of space is taken up, ecosystems under the footprint are essentially made barren as far as most flora and fauna are concerned. There are massive health risks along the manufacturing history of an iphone or laptop, and something something EHS something end users. There’s no way I could argue that they have no concerns worth tackling, but – and I admit I might be wrong here – I can’t help but feel that the biggest motivating factor in play here is the financial issue. A solar farm is, I think, a net good when all factors are considered, but it’s not a revenue stream; not for the locals or local government, anyway.
I guess we would need to find a way to make it a revenue stream, or make that issue a non-issue… which is probably not a “this decade” problem, much as I wish it were.
@15
it is not an either or question it is a problem of thinking outside of the existing model of centralized massive generators/w long distribution networks. It looks to me that a much more integrated distributed system would be more efficient than what we have today. I almost hesitate to describe the one we have as a system that would be very harmonious to a 1950 soviet system massively centralized system without a politbureau but with all the vested interest in giant monopolies.
I would suspect that all the brown dead plants near the solar farm are from the indiscriminate use of weed/vegetation killers which could cause toxic run- off.
uncle frogy
@8 & 11
Yes, PV systems can catch fire. The panels produce DC current and if a cable falls off it may generate an arc discharge that can set things nearby on fire.
If the installation is made properly the risk is extremely low. There are now well over a million rooftop installations in Europe and they have not led to a large number of fires. It does mean you should make sure that you use a qualified installer, something that is required by law in many countries.
When Green Energy Isn’t Green
by Chris Clarke
Thanks, Chas- that is the piece I was thinking about.
Maybe I’m not understanding the economics behind solar panels. For an individual (or business), their financial incentive to put up solar panels is that every watt of power the solar panels produce is a watt that doesn’t have to get bought from the power company (or can be sold to the power company if an excess is produced).
Wouldn’t there be a similar incentive for a town? Say the solar farm produces 10% of the town’s total energy consumption. Therefore ALL town residents get a 10% rebate on their electricity bill. Or the town simply “sells” the electricity to the power company for extra money in their coffers so they might be able to (for instance) lower property taxes or improve services. What am I missing?
That doesn’t negate the environmental and other effects, but it seems there should be more of a financial incentive for the town beyond the $7000 fire training.
“A solar farm is, I think, a net good when all factors are considered, but it’s not a revenue stream; not for the locals or local government, anyway.”
This is, perhaps more significant a thing to be weary of. We all want cheap energy. Energy generation has 2 core recurring *people* costs: the cost of the resources to acquire raw materials, and the cost of the labor in managing its conversion into usable energy, through the extended maintenance of the facility. Those people costs are the real expense.
Solar has neither of those costs. It is cheap energy. It is everything we want in that regard, but it doesn’t give back directly in terms of paying people to do those jobs. For the present, it is cheap energy production, but it isn’t actually making electricity dramatically cheaper on the open market. Regional regulations and price controls are a factor, but so is the fact that “what the market will bear” is higher from so many generations of increasing costs at the retail level.
Many localities, especially older rural ones like DC, are strapped for cash because of that combination of price regulation and the inflation of the costs of power from coal plants – they lost much of the budget necessary for last-mile maintenance, and the region suffers for it through almost every storm. So any wholesale price drop on the grid because of an increase in solar farms is not going to be noticed by the end customer, not for some time to come, not until the local company is able to get back in the black and out of the red in dealing with the aging infrastructure amidst regulations that prevent them from charging customers more.
So yeah, from that perspective, the solar farm owners will take in a LOT of money for the price of cheap land, because they’ll charge the same amount as the coal plants at a fraction of the long-term maintenance costs. Exploitation at its finest.
The only other alternative is for the regulation of the solar farms require them to sell a significant percentage of the output at a reduced rate to the local electric company, who then pass on the savings to the town. Price controls. If it is so much cheaper to make it, then pass that savings on in a way people notice.
If they don’t notice it getting better, we’ll never really get any more, and oil, gas, and coal will continue to destroy out atmosphere ’til they run out, along with all the mountains they are hiding in.
and I think I just said something similar to #26 (but with a little bit of backstory) at the same time. :)
@richardelguru, #13
My cousin runs a kindergarten for around 20 kids in a purpose built bungalow beside her own 2-storey house in Galway, Ireland. The house and kindergarten both have 15 sq. meters of solar panels for electricity and a further 4 sq. meters for water heating, plus a micro wind turbine on each building. Her total mains electricty bills for the year for the home plus business – including all the washing, lighting and heating costs for the kindergarten – average less than €600 per year. She made a return on her investment in 6 years.
@athywren, #21
The really big farms occupy about 10,000 sq. meters of solar panel for a reliable daily output of 1 MW in locations where weather is not a problem. In contrast, a 1,000 MW power station might have a foot print of around 900,000 sq. meters including related facilities and infrastructure. That’s a pretty massive difference (almost 1:10).
Its interesting to note that most solar PV panels actually work better when spread out and raised just high enough off the ground so as to allow plants to grow underneath them, as this helps keep the panels cool (high temperature can limit conversion). In some parts of Germany, local ordinances require that rooftop PV panels on commercial premises are combined with green roofs, to increase PV efficiency and support local biodiversity. So, massive crowded PV farms that shade out vegetation or take up desert space are actually self-limiting by design.
PZ, I think it’s perfectly OK to recognise that the arguments reported are pretty crackpot AND acknowledge that solar power is not consequence-free.
@2, 18 & others
A lot more energy could be produced by PV on roofs, industrial buildings or car parks, but if solar energy is going to produce a large fraction of our electricity, then we will need some land surface too. A quick’n’dirty estimate gives 35000km2 of surface needed if you want all electricity in the US to be produced by PV. That’s about 0.8% of the area used for agriculture. I couldn’t find numbers for corn-based ethanol production, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the area used for that is already bigger than that.
But it’s not necessary to have really enormous installations, a 100MW plant (about 1.2km2) only produces slightly cheaper electricity than, say, 1MW plants which cover a couple of acres. As always the question is whether we are willing to pay a wee bit more to reduce environmental problems.
In Pierre Boulle’s delightful novel “Mirrors of the Sun” (1982), a “Green” government takes power in France, and launches a colossal solar power plant.
Perversely, many, many problems ensue, (pollution, unemployment, all the birds being roasted by the mirrors or smashing into them, etc…)
Ultimately the interlocked problems with the showcase solar project lead to the fall of the government and the suicide of the prime minister.
Pierre Boulle is the author of “The Bridge over the River Kwai” (1952) and “Planet of the Apes” (1963), and many more.
“Ears of the Jungle” (1972), written during the Vietnam war, is a must-read.
You’re missing a “0”. To get those numbers, you need to completely ignore capacity factor (e.g. the sun is not always shining) or you need to ignore conversion efficiency.
Optimistically 100 W / m^2 for daily average in winter, for many non-Sahara locations.
Reasonably, 10% conversion efficiency for reasonable-cost mass-producable solar panels.
(1 MW) (1 m^2 / 100 W) (1 / 10%) = 100,000 sq meters.
So, more like 100 less land usage for coal compared to solar panel on this naive estimate, when using proper numbers.
…
I would add that I just spent some time looking into this issue in more detail, and I found that many so-called greens will claim the reverse, that solar uses less land than coal. Just do a quick google search, and you will find many. These so-called greens can only reach that conclusion by including every possible additional land use for coal, but not doing the same for solar. Ex: land required for waste disposal (ex fly ash), water usage converted somehow into land usage, land usage for mining, etc.
Tangent: I would add that nuclear’s additional land usage in these areas is miniscule.
Of course, we’re still comparing apples to oranges. We’re comparing “daily average” unreliable power (solar) to actual reliable power production (coal). Want to know what the land usage is for backing energy storage? Well, using the only grid-scale proven method, pumped water storage, the results are not pretty. Assuming we want to get serious and provide storage to buffer the electricity from solar production, in order to make it reliable, only the US, with the only kind of energy storage that is proven at grid scale, pumped water storage:
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/
The net result is that so-called green advocates for solar and wind generally don’t know what they’re talking about, or they are dishonest – like in this case including all kinds of extras for coal but none for solar, aka cherrypicking.
Why the heck shouldn’t coal take account of the area devoted to the production and disposal of its fuel source?
Dunno. A reasonable analysis probably should.
What I did say is that any fair analysis should do the same for solar.
Quick Google search. Surface of the earth: 509 million square km (71% water) then
496,805 square kilometers of solar panels to provide renewable power for the entire Earth.
Professor Myers,
Great post you raise some very interesting and important points, as did the good folks of Woodlawn NC. Glad to see some pushback against the media trying to spin this into some kind of NIMBY reaction fueled by ignorance and pseudoscience.
This is a real problem in many places. Is it a coincidence that on the one hand Woodlawn is reportedly becoming a ghost town and lacks employment opportunities and on the other hand they are embroiled in problems related to solar farm incursion? Seems like there is a strong correlation here if nothing else. Even if the solar farm itself isn’t causing these problems (which hasn’t been disproven yet btw) it’s doing nothing at all to solve them. That’s for sure.
This is a very important point too often overlooked. This has to be factored into the cost benefit calculations.
Any time carcinogens and toxins are involved it’s a fair question and fair concern to ask about the health risks. And what the people of Woodlawn need is good solid science based information and a thoughtful treatment of their concerns and objections as you have given here.
Agreed it’s more than fair to point these things out. It’s the good work of a true skeptic to consider these consequences and to take seriously folks who decide it’s just not worth it to them. It’s their town and they are the ones who have to live with the consequences afterall.
*should be Woodland not Woodlawn
Sorry if this is too ignorant, but is there a reason solar freakin roadways wouldn’t work?
Hmm… I just wrote a long rant, and either it was too long, or it had too many citations (links), and it was flagged for moderation. I don’t see that moderation message any more, and my post has disappeared for me. Unfortunate. ><
tl;dr I hate the misinformation being spread by ignorant or dishonest solar and wind advocates. We have a serious problem called climate change, and esp ocean acidification, and we need to be solving this yesterday with technology that is not available now, and wind and solar cannot cut it. So-called renewables cannot cut it either. Nuclear all the way, including AP-1000s, and preferably safer and cleaner reactors like the IFR, i.e. S-PRISM, and several MSR designs, like ThorCon and Flibe.
Let me include at least this:
This link is something that very few people know, and it’s the reason that wind and solar are just not going to happen, barring some radical technological breakthrough.
http://bravenewclimate.com/2014/08/22/catch-22-of-energy-storage/
As I often say, I’m for continued research into everything. However, relying on the hope that we’ll invent something soon to fix global warming and ocean acidification is foolish. We need to be doing something now that will fix the problem, not burying our heads in the sand. And that something we can be doing is nuclear.
Transportation is harder. There, the best hope seems to be using recent US Navy research to construct synthetic CO2 neutral hydrocarbon fuels from seawater (and electricity). Not sure it’ll work, but it definitely needs more funding.
Finally, we have already released too much CO2. Not only do we need to stop releasing CO2, we need to pull a lot of CO2 out of the air and into something chemically stable on the geological timescale. The best and only plan I’ve heard to do this is mine up massive amounts limestone, use ginormous amounts of (nuclear) electricity to take limestone, heat the lime to remove the CO2 and sequester the CO2 into basalt deposits where it should form chemically stable bonds, and dump the lime into the ocean where it will absorb CO2. It’ll only take on the neighborhood of 10 terawatts running for decades. It’s no coincidence that this is about how much energy we’re already using. We used that energy from burning and releasing that CO2, and now it’s time to pay our dues. That’s about 1 large-size nuclear plant being built once per day, for the next few decades. It’s hard, but it can be done. Unlike the solar and wind feel-good pipedreams.
That article is a beautiful example of dishonest journalism. “Hurr hurr these hicks think solar panels are some sort of magnet for sunlight!” What an arsehole.
Incidentally, desert land being bulldozed for solar panels is precisely what Chris Clarke has been talking about for a long time.
Only if the town was the actual owner of the solar farm, which is not what the company is proposing.
Special pleading, I would say.
P.S.
Has anyone else lost the ability to preview comments?
as soon as you can show me what will happen to the waste stream from nuclear power for the next 100,000 years I will considered it.
oh and solve the inefficiencies of transmission from generator to end users (losses).
uncle frogy
that is exactly the kind of journalism “Enlightenment Liberal” thrives on.
don’t bother arguing with it… in many years it has learned nothing. and listened to nobody.
it just pretends to.
seriously.
says the man comparing apples to oranges…
fuck you. seriously. you’re inevitable asinine anti-solar talking points have been taken apart hundreds of times, so many times that some of us are simply tired of doing so.
YOU NEVER LEARN. you never listen. you never bother to actually look at any of the information we provided when we felt discussion with you was actually productive.
never.
you always circle back to your same, dishonest, talking points.
why should anyone ever feel anything but disgust for you is beyond me.
Come on guys — the journalist was fair in pointing out the crackpot theories. “She also questioned the high number of cancer deaths in the area, saying no one could tell her that solar panels didn’t cause cancer.” Unless the journalist has actively misreported her words, she’s a crackpot. If there is a failing in the article it’s that it doesn’t go any deeper than saying “there are these crackpots opposed to solar power.” A really committed reporter would have spoken to a wider range of people and tried to tease out the non-crackpot arguments against solar panels. This is a fair criticism. But note that even with that, the journalist did point out that the community was not going to get much financial benefit, so he hardly seems to be parroting the corporate line.
EnlightenmentLiberal — nuclear power is not carbon neutral. Even though the energy generation part is emission-free, the uranium still needs to be mined and transported, and building a power station uses a huge amount of concrete, which is a CO2-generating process. Also, the only nuclear option that looks to be safe long-term is the thorium reactor — it’s a good idea and I’m all in favour of further research, but it’s just as provisional a technology as the others you complain about being provisional.
Big shopping malls should certainly have roof top and car park solar. They are huge power guzzlers and use a lot during daylight hours for indoor lighting and air conditioning.
I think you have misunderstood the target of my comment. The initial lines of text above the enumerated quotes were directed at the article referenced in the OP.
@39: No one has invented a solar panel that also has the durability, friction, and other material properties necessary for a road surface. The current road surface materials of choice (asphalt and concrete) have to be replaced every few years, depending on weather and usage. A solar power-generating road surface would have to be sufficiently long-lasting and cheap that it could generate more energy during its lifetime that would be required to manufacture it. Current solar tech still requires several years of operation before the panels offset their manufacturing costs, and a solar panel that had to stand up to cars driving over it wouldn’t last long enough to yield a net positive energy production.
While I don’t think that scorn is the proper response here, and the town is free to zone how it wants, the residents’ complaints seem trivial and beside the point. The reason why a solar company wants to build solar farms there is that the land is very cheap. The reason why the land is cheap is that no one wants to do anything with it. That’s the town’s real problem. Not building solar farms isn’t going to make that empty space any more desirable.
Moreover, the kinds of things that make a community an interesting and fun (not to mention lucrative) place to live aren’t land-intensive. If the town is boring and bleeding residents (with concomitant reductions in property value), what they need to ask themselves are things like: What kind of a downtown do we have? Are there any industries that would like to locate here, and if not, why? Are there any cultural attractions? How are the parks and recreation? How are the schools and infrastructure? Etc. Solar farms really have nothing to do with any of this. Heck, the proposed farm isn’t even within the town limits (which is why they get no tax benefit), so it’s not even clear what they’re worried about.
To Ichthyic
It’s been a while, but as I recall, last time you and the others didn’t actually discuss the merits of the issue. All you did was cite authorities who themselves didn’t provide material. It would be like citing an evolutionist to a creationism who only says “it’s true, trust me”, without providing any work, etc.
If you want to engage with substance instead of fallacious appeals to authority, I’m still interested.
I still welcome you to present a solution to:
– Providing 1 kw to every person, for 10 billion people, approx 10 terawatts
– While being effectively no CO2 release
– While providing another 10 terawatts to power the process involving limestone and line in order to sequester CO2 out of the atmosphere / ocean
So-called green environmentalists don’t have a solution. We cannot wait for a solution. We’re already too late and we’re going to suffer. We need to start solving this now. The only option that can work now with what technology we have now is nuclear fission.
…
Contrary to popular myth, nuclear waste cannot kill everyone on the planet. The more dilute it is, and the less chance that it will harm you. The amount of high level radioactive waste is ridiculously small. For example, the waste from the US would fit in a football field, in the field itself, about 2 meters tall.
Compare this to the size of fly ash from coal, or the amount of toxic waste from solar panel construction, and the nuclear waste is simply a non-issue by comparison.
As for disposal, there are spots on the ocean floor that we know have been untouched for millions of years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_floor_disposal
Literally just put it there. No human will ever be harmed, ever.
With newer fuel efficient reactors, like the IFR and several MSR designs, the waste remains radioactive above the levels of natural uranium of ore for only 300 to 800 years (depending on the design), and we’re not in a rush to dig up natural uranium ore and safely dispose of it.
Why does this matter? You seem to be operating on many false assumptions.
…
To chrislawson
And wind and solar aren’t carbon neutral too. Their mining and manufacture can also produce CO2. To be fair, presumably we’re going to compare apples to apples, and assume it’s wind and solar electricity powering the mining equipment / creating synthetic CO2-neutral gasoline, vs nuclear supplying the same power.
If you have seen absurd statistics that say nuclear produces as much CO2 as coal, it is a bald-faced lie. The paper will directly or indirectly cite a paper by a certain Mark Z Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, liar extraordinaire, along with anyone who cites this particular work. In short, the paper is often cited to make nuclear look much worse than solar and wind by far on the topic of CO2. When you dig into the paper, it makes this argument by assuming that expansion of nuclear power will lead to war, and war produces lots of CO2 (and deaths), and that’s how the paper gets to its conclusion.
In actual fact, concrete manufacture does release CO2, but IIRC CO2 from nuclear power plant manufacture is similar to CO2 from solar panel manufacture and wind mill manufacture. As for the mining, if we went to a fuel efficient reactor, we have enough nuclear fuel around to last decades or more, and when we get a thorium breeder working, we’ll get enough thorium as a byproduct from rare earth metal mining – we would need no dedicated mining for nuclear fuel for centuries, or millenia.
It’s really not.
http://thorconpower.com/
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2015/12/prweb13110710.htm
That’s the false equivalenec.
We can build AP-1000 reactors, right now, and that will solve the problem for decades, giving us time to figure out other solutions.
For a reactor concept like ThorCon, it’s quite plausible that in less than a decade, they could be in full scale production, one, 1 GW, nuclear reactor one per day, every day, for decades. And if we went Manhattan Project-style, it could be even faster.
The only reason we didn’t have this solved decades ago is because the US government stopped funding, and killed research programs, and everyone else thought “if the US government isn’t doing, then we’re not doing it”. These reactors are ready for full scale commercial building and testing right now. No one can name a so-called renewable / green solution that we can test right now. It is simply a false equivocation to compare the readiness of solar and wind, vs the readiness of reactors like ThorCon, S-PRISM, etc.
Thorium is the gateway drug for nuclear reactors, but the idea that thorium is much safer than uranium reactors is simply false. The molten salt reactor is much safer than the conventional pressurized light water reactor, but the liquid metal fast breeder reactor, aka IFR, aka S-PRISM, is also much safer than the pressurized light water reactor. Even the pressurized light water reactor is ridiculously safe compared to things like coal, oil, nat gas, solar, wind, hydro dams, going by the historical record. This is simply the facts. The dangers of nuclear power are grossly exaggerated, and they’re being judged by reactors that are literally 40 years old, rather than current tech with current knowledge. And they’re being compared to vaporware solar and wind technologies that don’t actually exist.
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To all
We have a problem now. Ocean acidification is a real thing, and depending on what source you trust, within 50 years we might be looking at severe ocean extinctions as the ph of the ocean drops. The ph of the ocean has already dropped from 8.2 to 8.1 during the human industrial age, and it’s expected to drop below 8.0 within 50 years.
We have seen CO2 release at this rate only time in Earth’s history, and that was at the Great Dying, the Permian extinction. We need to be taking this much more seriously than we currently are. We need to be building these nuclear reactors now, in order to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere / ocean now.
I think it’s fair to say that many issues this town faces don’t have to do much with solar power as such. They weren’t the striving centre of industrial attention before and solar farms wouldn’t have done anything to help. They wouldn’t own the solar farms, so they wouldn’t generate the revenue. That’s a problem of means of production, not of solar energy.
Which isn’t actually true. The panels aren’t put up horizontally, creating eternal darkness underneath, so yes there are still plants growing. I remember reading an article from Britain where farmers said the solar panels allowed them to use their land double: the solar panels produced energy while they could still graze their sheep underneath
@36 – 496,805 square kilometers of solar panels to provide renewable power for the entire Earth.
So, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and West Tennessee, give or take. Works for me – let them contribute something positive, for a change.
@EnlightenmentLiberal(#33):
About the storage.
The good news is that they are finally making progress into a cheap, less damaging (the stuff is still fairly high on the pH scale but less then current acids used are down on that scale), long term stable liquids for flow batteries. It would still require fairly massive installations, think 4 oil storage tanks & a conversion/interaction station in the middle (to start scale up as needed) but it would be on a scale that allows it to be build next/under/on a wind or solar farm instead of having people seriously suggesting to repurpose an old deep mineshaft into an artificial gravity based storage solution (which is not that bad environmentally speaking even with the water storage area required above ground, just not commercially viable in price).
The down side of this stuff is that it is still in fairly early research so scale up might be a problem and the time to get it out of the lab is not yet known.
@paercival(#39):
Cost, reliability, safety.
There have been a few trials trying to use them as water heaters. Either it didn’t work reliable enough or it made the road brittle. Heat storage for surrounding buildings or to just defrost the road during the winter didn’t work out either.
The nearest thing I can remember is a, if I remember correctly, hexagonal tile for sidewalks 2 foot across that would generate 65 watt or so per tile.
Yeah, I’ve done it in the past… It’s not actually the end of the world. Simply using less energy is the one approach that (a) is absolutely guaranteed to work, (b) could be implemented immediately, and (c) nobody wants to talk about.
To Who Cares
Concerning flow batteries. I’ve seen a lot of vaporware flow batteries, such as Ambri. The guy had a great TED talk. Unfortunately, the design called for the use of antimony, which means it couldn’t scale. When this was noticed, they said that they had a second chemistry, but AFAIK they didn’t release the details, and I haven’t heard from them then. That seems to be the story of every one of this miracle battery technologies that I’ve looked into that claim grid-scalability, and I’ve looked into half a dozen. They all seem to be scams.
I also urge you to read the link at brave new climate.
http://bravenewclimate.com/2014/08/22/catch-22-of-energy-storage/
Even if they found a battery that’s made of abundant elemental materials, there’s still the nasty problem of energy-returned-on-energy-invested, and likely any battery technology attached to solar will sink the solution on that metric. Batteries tend to require lots of input energy to manufacture. The refining process for one – batteries generally require relatively pure materials. By the paper’s estimates, most plausible kinds of batteries plus solar is not thermodynamically feasible.
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To Dunc
The idea of lessening energy usage is actually a common one in so-called environmental journals. Energy efficiency is good, and we could probably cut down on energy usage a lot without impacting qualify of life – especially for the average American. However, if you take that thought to its implied conclusions, it’s immoral and self-defeating. The facts of the matter are that the nations with the best environmental records on most environmental metrics (except CO2) are the rich countries that spend a lot of energy per capita. Because they have a lot of fossil fuel energy per capita, they don’t need to clear cut forests for additional farmland – they can use high energy fertilizer.
Malthus is wrong. The fact is that as you raise standard of living, which is directly tied to energy consumption, birth rates go down, and population growth rates go down. In many western countries, population growth rates are already negative after factoring out increased life expectancy and immigration. IIRC, Japan actually has negative growth rates. We need to stabilize the human population, and that means powering up, not powering down.
Fun factoid – approximately 1% or 2% of global energy production goes into farming. Fertilizer production takes a lot of energy. Without modern high energy fertilizers, with the given land that we have, I’ve seen estimates that we could only support about a billion people and the rest would starve from lack of food. Short of mass starvation – genocide of most of the world’s population – we are not going to power down. It’s just not going to happen.
Consider the life of someone without electricity. They have no refrigeration. Hospitals are difficult. Drinking river water is a lot more dangerous than drinking ground water. You need electricity for the pumps. With more power, you can also do things like proper sanitation, sewage treatment, etc. IIRC, approx 7 million people die every year from particulate airborne pollution, about half from simple indoor heating and cooking from animal dung and other unclean heating sources. For these people, having a little bit of electricity is a matter of life and death.
Maybe you could argue that people could get along with 100 watts instead of Europe’s 1000 watts. Maybe. I don’t know. I’m not equipped to argue minutiae right now. That’s probably too small for places that need heating in the winter. Regardless, at 100 watts per person, 10 billion people, that’s still 1 terawatt. The only thing that can provide that amounnt of power, cleanly, is nuclear.
Of course, then if you remember that we need another 10 terawatts or so in order to power the limestone to lime process to pull CO2 out of the air and sequester it, and then it should be immediately obvious that powering down is simply not an option. The alternative may well be the death of most of the human population.
“Implied conclusions”? Your reductio is just that, and not in any sense an “implied conclusion” of the suggestion that we can simply choose to use less energy.
Most things become ridiculous if you take them to maximal extremes. I was going to include a pre-emptive argument against that sort of absuridty, but I figured I’d let somebody else step up and construct and then gleefully torch a gigantic strawman. It’s always reliable, and I kind of enjoy seeing people who apparently consider themselves intelligent eagerly debasing themselves with such obviously stupid and fallacious arguments.
Pointing out that we can choose to use less energy without significanlty reducing our quality of life does not in any way imply that I think we should give up electricity entirely.
I perceived this as somehow a rebuttal or alternative to my position that we need to build-out nuclear like crazy. I still assume that’s what you intended to convey. If not, my apologies.
However, if I am right concerning your intentions, then my points stand: You cannot reduce consumption to any amount where my plan of massive rollout of nuclear is unavoidable. Maybe it changes the schedule of 1 reactor per day to 1 reactor per 2 days. It doesn’t change the overall picture of the solution. In that context, your point about conservation and limited powering-down is largely a non-sequitir to the conversation we need to be having, which is: We need a shitton more nuclear, and we need to convince people to get over their irrational and fact-free fears, and we need to get people over their unfortunately unfounded trust of wind, solar, and other “renewables”.
Whenever somebody brands their pet solution as “unavoidable” or “without alternatives” you know you’ve met a true believer…
To Giliell
When there is strong arguers on both sides, sometimes the truth does not lie in the middle. Sometimes one side is just right. Ex: creationists vs evolutionists.
Care to make some argument other than a fallacious argument by generalization? Like, actually address the points of substance?
It wan’t. Pro tip: you can tell who and what I’m replying to by looking at the words I quote at the beginning of my replies. I was not talking to you, and I have no particularly strong ideological commitments regarding nuclear energy, either pro or anti.
If you want to argue with the neo-primitivists in your head, carry on, but leave me out of it.
Still, since you seem to determined to have an argument about nuclear power, I’ll give you one: the problem with nuclear power is not public opinion, it’s project financing. It is not an attractive investment proposition – it’s far too heavily front-loaded and capital intensive to succeed in the current marketplace. If it was an attractive investment, people would be doing it, and public opinion be damned. That is what you need to fix.
[Sidebar: public opinion is actually broadly in favour of nuclear power. Pro-nuke people just like to pretend otherwise so that they can ignore the real problems preventing a nuclear power build-out – namely, the economic ones – in favour of hippie-punching. Nobody really gives a fuck what the hippies think, and they would care even less if there was decent money to be made.]
Apologies for the close-italics screw-up there…
I for one will say fuck no I will not put up any argument with you, you just brush away everything you do not like so what would be the point?
uncle frogy
Sure, but the vocal people win out in the end. Clinton cancels the IFR program at Argonne National Lab to cater to the green constituency. There is no similar constituency for real environmentalism, just this self destructive faux environmentalism.
Widespread lukewarm support, IMHO combined with widespread widespread NIMBY, doesn’t trump a small cadre of activists. Small cadres of activists are the ones that change the world, not a lukewarm majority.
I don’t see any noticeable clamoring for a restart of the IFR program, or calls for funding some MSR designs. Whereas, I see plenty of calls against nuclear and for solar and wind. I also see plenty of calls from “the other side” that climate change isn’t even real. I almost never see activists for nuclear, aka true environmentalism.
…
Also, unclefrogy, won’t know until you try. Of course, given that you think that transmission line losses are a real impediment to nuclear power rollout, I think it’s safe to say that 1- you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, and 2- you strongly think that you do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
I suggest reading a book, taking that chip off your shoulder, and taking your head out of your ass.
Nick Gotts, it is more a case of the local community banding together and putting up a windmill. Having said that, there are rules in place that means that if a windmill is put up nearby, you have a legal right to by a share in it, so you are partly right.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is getting to be like the new Godwin’s law. In any internet discussion, it will eventually be brought up, with the implication that they (those you are arguing with) suffer from it, but you do not. I really wish people on every side of every argument would stop using it. The actual paper by Dunning and Kruger doesn’t even say what the internet meme thinks it says. Sorry, side rant.
On topic: Nuclear energy. Question number 1, for me, is how are you going to prevent a Fukushima from happening? Question number 2 is how do you make it economically viable? Remember, we’re not actually running out of fossil fuels. We’ve got enough oil and coal for now to make the use of oil and coal cheap. What we’re running out of is cold weather and forcing people to give up the oil that is there is going to be difficult when the threat is not that it will not be there or that it will be expensive, but only that the weather will change. So, subsidies? Why for nuclear, which has kind of been demonstrated to fail to work well, and not solar or wind or geothermal which may be unproven but are not disproven?
Yep, that’S when talking about claims of science. It’s not a matter of talking about questions of future and politics. There are always multiple ways, options, solutions. There are always compromises and downsides. You can make arguments why your proposal is the best, the most realistic, cost efficient etc. To declare it to be without an alternative is shutting down discussion, so why should I make the effort to put up arguments when you have decided the question is settled already? Are you going to pay me or what?
@diane 67,
I really, really wish I could remember the exactly numbers, but it’s been years and I can’t. However, I was doing a research paper on nuclear power as an alternative to coal, and IIRC to equal the environment impact of the coal industry, the nuclear industry would have to have Chernobyl level events at a laughable regularity…something to the effect of one every two weeks or something of that nature (again, can’t recall the exact numbers).
The thing about Fukushima Daiichi is that it was a an old plant built with 60’s era technology that was built in a less than ideal location (not that the Japanese had much choice in the matter) using outmoded safety systems. Not to say there aren’t serious concerns to nuclear power, but I think the sensationalist “NUCLEAR DISASTER” headlines are more compelling than a lot of the issues related to our already full-tilt fossil fuel production (the devil we know, and all that).
Matrim@69: every plant that’s had a mishap had a singularly unusual reason for having a mishap. We’ve had two really dangerous accidents so far, plus another that we don’t fully understand why it self-contained, out of 438 plants operating for the past roughly 50 years.
To get most of our power from nuclear, we’d need about 10x as many plants (allowing for growth in power consumption, principally in Africa and India). So now we’re talking about a nuclear meltdown every 1.6 years. Somehow increase the safety margin 10x and you have a nuclear meltdown every 16 years. I’m not seeing how this is such a negligible risk.
I just used the googlethingummy and checked the latitude of Woodlawn. It’s 36N. I also found out that the annual average rainfall is 48 inches.
With solar panels installed on frameworks with the optimal slope of 36 degrees and at a suitable height for small animals or poultry to graze beneath them, there’s no chance of dead, brown grass under the whole set up.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/feb/17/ministers-claims-that-solar-panels-harm-uk-food-security-are-false
piccie … http://renews.biz/Images/Sheep-grazing-under-soilar-panels-credit-British-Solar-Renewables.jpg
Right now, for the US, the cheapest way to get cleaner power is to build out wind and solar.
http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/assumptions/pdf/table_8.2.pdf
The price of wind and solar are diving and will continue to fall for a few years.
Wind and solar also have the advantage that they are very quick to put up. You can get solar panels on your roof by the end of the month. Permits for windmills are not too complicated, so a farmer can get one in their field next year. Utility-scale is slower, but still tends to be far less contentious than fossil fuel plants, which are far less contentious than nuclear plants.
So for the purpose of reducing pollution as fast as possible, wind and solar win. We can install a bunch, and as “batteries” for when they don’t produce enough we can use the currently existing fossil fuel capacity that they mothball.
The big problem with this incremental approach is that it requires business models that are different than most utilities live by now. In fact, one problem with solar is that it demolishes the business model of using the profit made during the day at the peak usage time to pay for the nighttime baseload — because now the peak power is cheap. That’s a political problem, not a technical problem.
Dianne, the radiation leak from Fukushima is greatly exaggerated, mostly by the sort of people that think nuclear reactors are just a malfunction away from becoming nclear bombs. This chart may help with perspective.
I find that a pretty misleading one as most units are “per year” or “per x-ray” except for the ones relating to nuclear incidents when suddenly the unit is “per two weeks”.
Also, just because you’Re already getting an amount X of radiation doesn’t mean that X + 0.5X is no big deal.
@43 unclefrogy
Unless you solve the problem of storing energy efficiently, solar power in no way the transimmsion problem. Half the bloody world is dark at any given time.
@68 Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk-
Sure, but the only reason the problem isn’t entirely a scientific one is that politicians in particular and people in general are stupid. At the moment, wind and solar can at best supplement a reliable power grid – they can’t be the base of it because they aren’t reliable. If there is an alternative method of reliable power production that is more environmentally friendly than nuclear power, I haven’t heard of it.
@74 Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk-
If not two weeks, how long do you suggest that evacuation takes?
So are you saying that using market forces to determine which technologies we should use for energy generation is stupid, and that we should instead be making long-term strategic decisions about which technologies to use and then making that happen by some form of state-driven central planning?
(For the avoidance of doubt, I would tend to agree with that general proposition, but most people who strongly support nuclear power also seem to oppose the level of state intervention that would be needed to tip the economic scales enough make it happen, and don’t seem to notice the discrepancy.)
erik333
I’m not suggesting anything. I’m suggesting that you should not compare “two weeks” with “a year” to make units look smaller. If I compared the median household income of a year with what, say, a football coach makes in two weeks, it wouldn’t look like he’s massively overpaid, right? And you’d call me out on it, right?
Matrim
So, we build new plants every 30 years? Not just to account for progress in technology, but also to account for wear and tear. France is currently planning to let some nuclear plants run up to 100 freaking years…
@77 Dunc
I absolutely think the state should control the vital services needed for a functioning society. If private investors don’t want to build nuclear plants, the state should if the state thinks it’s of long term benefit.
@78 Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk-
Thats not a reasonable comparison because the football coach presumably works more than two weeks per year while my guess would be that they expect the population to be evacuated inside two weeks. The radiation level the rest of the year is irrelevant because the people are not there anymore, presumably. Afaict this is the *least* dishonest way to present the data, assuming two weeks is a reasonable time frame.
They never mention the cost of giving up said land for human inhabitation or how this compares to land lost if nuclear power was replaced with alternative power sources like hydroplants, coal plants or solar plants, but there is always a scope to any report.
Yes, but most of the world has its peak electricity usage during the day, so that’s not a great argument against solar. It’s also completely not an argument against wind, which still blows at night.
I get this weird sense that nuclear advocates seem to think that there must be One Technology To Power Them All (and in the darkness, continue powering them), and that wind and solar are a competitor to the One True Solution, which is nuclear plants of various designs.
Wind and solar right now compete with fossil fuels. Wind and solar can be built right now, whereas nuclear plants take a long time to permit and build. Right now, we can reduce CO2 emissions per watt-hour using wind and solar — and while the advocates of nuclear power pontificate, that’s what is actually happening in the real world because that’s the cheapest, quickest solution.
Yes, there’s a wall that you hit with wind and solar when you get to 30-40%. At that point you start to need to do a lot more work to keep reducing fossil fuel use in electricity production. We are still far from there.
In the early 1980’s I worked for the DOE on a Critical Materials Resource Assessment tool. The cost to produce energy in capital materials (construction) is significant. Solar energy requires many more pounds of material per kilowatt hour produced (capacity). We gave congressmen modeling tools to project how much of the world’s capacity to produce (say) concrete or steel or glass to build new plants. You could change the mix of solar, wind, and even ocean-thermal and see how practical such strategies are.
Bottom line: Nuclear power produces more energy while using fewer resources than everything else. I think we can do it more safely with nuclear than with oil or coal (deadly that they are).
@81 numerobis
I felt it needn’t be pointed out that it’s not always windy, hence you have similar but probably not as appaling problems with power transmission as solar does. Solar and wind are fundamentally unsuited to being backbones of a power grid unless you either solve the problem of efficient energy storage *or* the problem of energy redistribution (assuming the is enough wind power to be collected at every given time)*or* you decide that having energy is a luxury you can’t expect to get during “bad weather”*. Otherwise you will still need a backbone of reliable energy production using other means.
*from the pov of solar or wind power plants
@79 Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk-
You build new ones if safety or economics demands you build new ones. Whether or not a hundred years is a reasonable lifetime for a particular plant depends on how well that plant was constructed and how well it has been maintained. I’t not like they plan to run them for a 100 years without inspecting and evaluating the plants along the way is it?
ivarhusa@82: it may shock you, but the price of PV and wind have declined in the past 30 years. A lot.
erik333@83: you demonstrate exactly my point. Your argument for nuclear is that solar can’t do it on its own, wind can’t do it on its own, hydro can’t do it on its own, biomass can’t do it on its own. The only technology left standing is nuclear!
That’s bullshit. A low-carbon energy economy will have all of those technologies in it.
@85 numerobis
Except i never argued you should only do nuclear, I argued you should do nuclear. Btw, depending on where you live, hydro can do it on its own, but often impacts e.g. aquatic wildlife. However, you shouldn’t do fossil.
Yeah, because 500 new houses, and a mall, and its parking lot, would “improve” things in the same way.
Seriously though, the real solution in better, single home/neighborhood systems. You have people out there developing what is basically an update to roads – solar on the street, since you need the road, and it makes sense to use it to generate power too, if you can. Same tech can be used in your drive way. Better sealed air conditioning and better insulation in houses, so that the one big power eater (heating and cooling) is less costly, then solar on the roof, to power it (or at least partially). In the long run this will be how it “must” go, to work well. But, in the short term… a big ass corporation can’t make you pay for power your own house generates, and despite the silly assed attempts in some places to suggest/do this, its really damned fishy for the government to tax what your own house produces for you either (which is why they have tried to tax the sale of that power back to the power companies, which, as income, if you are going to charge income tax, sort of makes sense, but only if you make more off it than you pay for the damn power from the big corporation).
Basically, a big wind farm, you can’t really do on most residences, but solar.. is getting close to viable, but it loses *everyone else* money they could be taking out of your pocket, for buying power some place else. Of course half the state governments (or at least a lot of people in the conservative ones) are against it, but “for” huge assed power company run, “solar farms”. And, of course, just like fraking, and so many other things those companies do, no one, other than the people directly effected by it, give a damn about the results. Still, it is a… useful, if annoying, middle measure. The optimal solution is, “Take solar production out of the hands of big business, and install it, from day one, in new houses.” But, its not there yet, and.. the other option is to keep using worse technologies, until it is. Not sure what the solution is supposed to be.
eric333
So, Fukushima only emits radioactivity 2 weeks a year?
Sorry, you can’t have your cake and eat it, too. You can either argue that the impact of Fukushima on the people there wasn’T that big because they were evacuated swiftly and therefore only had a moderate increas in radiation exposure or you can argue that radiation leaks from Fukushima was not that bad.
It’s a plain and simply rule of an honest presentation that if you want to compare two things, you use the same units. If it’s per year, it’s per year. How do you think the effect of that graphic would be if they used the “per year” consistently?
Yep, apparently that is determined afterwards. REally, they shouldn’t have built Fukushima there and they should have built a new one ten years ago. Of course, the week before that event safety didn’T demand that it be closed…
The nuclear people are even worse than the pro coal people. Nuclear offers almost no advantages. It’s way more expensive than solar or wind (and this is after governments provided nuclear companies with limited liability so they can actually purchase insurance, something which no insurance firm would offer them without government sponsored limited liability, making nuclear DoA). And worse, it has been getting MORE expensive, while solar and wind have been getting exponentially cheaper (although wind’s cost effectiveness is now levelling off).
And nuclear supporters using a townspeople’s concerns about the NIMBY effects of solar or wind is hilarious at best, because they are the first to complain about how the NIMBY people don’t want radioactive nuclear waste buried in their backyards.
Here’s a link to a Grist article comparing the amount of land needed for coal vs. solar:
Which has a bigger footprint, a coal plant or a solar farm?
Rough answer: about the same.
kagehi
Roads aren’t a good option, especially in urban and suburban areas. They’ll be shaded by trees for starters. When traffic is heavy the vehicles shade a lot of the area supposed to be exposed to the sun. In snowy areas, even a light snowfall will substantially reduce the amount of power that can be collected.
The obvious solution is to instal them on roofs until such time as we can make roofs out of PV tiles. Personally, I prefer a green roof with PV attached because we still have issues about stormwater runoff, maintaining steady temperature within the building and keeping the PV panels as cool as possible. A green roof with PV attached solves several issues in one hit, whereas the PV only option leaves you with those other problems to solve or ameliorate.
As for power consumption, building or retro-fitting houses to passivhaus or near-passivhaus standards is the way to go to reduce power demand for heating and cooling.
Should have said. Passivhaus where that’s the right solution. Other solutions for tropical and mediterranean climates wouldn’t have the same features although the function – protection from the weather – is much the same.
Queenslander for tropical climates – http://www.laketerrace.com.au/_img/909×465/IMG_9009.jpg
To dianne
Fukushima isn’t that bad compared to the alternative of global warming or mass human starvation. Fukushima didn’t kill anyone via radiation, and it’s unlikely to lead to a single human death from radiation (except perhaps those that went into the plant afterwards for cleanup).
Fukushima is also a 40 year old design. We have better designs, like the AP-1000. Next-gen reactors are even safer, like the IFR aka S-PRISM and several MSRs like ThorCon, esp ThorCon. These new reactors are walkaway safe, esp ThorCon, which means that no operator intervention is required for safety. No electricity is required for safety. If Fukushima was an AP-1000, S-PRISM, or ThorCon, no accident would have happened.
Also, the lack of high pressure means safety is much easier to ensure. Because of the lack of high pressure, that’s one less driver to move radioactive stuff into the atmosphere.
Going into the full technical details of safety is lengthy, but there are very good reasons to believe that even if you shot a bunker-buster missile at a MSR which blew up the entire reactor core, because of the chemistry of the reactor core, the worst that would happen is some highly radioactive salt would contaminate the immediate area, and nothing would go into the atmosphere, because the dangerous elements, the caesium, iodine, and strontium, form very stable fluoride salts. Unlike a convetional pressurized light water reactor, where there is high pressure to force things into the atmosphere, the dangerous atoms are not in chemically stable bonds, and there is water in the core which further complicates things and provides pressure and chemical pathways for the dangerous stuff to go into the air.
IFR designs are also pretty good on safety and have passive safety characteristics too.
The question of economic viability is harder to answer in this space. It’s a combination of several factors.
First, conventional pressurized light water reactors require massive pressures (they are “pressurized” reactors), approx 150 atmospheres IIRC. This requires special manufacturing techniques that are hard to do, error prone, hard to fix errors, expensive. (They need to form the pressure containment in a single forging.) When you move to atmospheric pressures like in a IFR or MSR, that cost goes away.
Second, fuel fabrication costs with a conventional pressurized light water reactor are expensive. With an IFR, I’ve heard that it will be less, and with a MSR, it will be substantially less.
Third, because of the inherent safety of the IFR and MSR designs, plus lack of pressure, they don’t need the triple redundant safety systems, and that saves costs. Safety by passive physics is much cheaper than safety by massive mechanical active safety systems.
I suggest the ThorCon sales pitch for some more of the reasoning involved.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfsOYzOpYRw
They plan to use shipyard automation to build their reactors in lego-blocks, barge them to the site, and connect them together like lego blocks. Most of the work happens at the shipyard with high automation and manufacturing line -like improvements to efficiency. Unlike a pressurized light water reactor, where all of the work must happen on site, and you don’t get benefits from production line -like systems.
And finally, regulations. It’s not all of it, but the particular method of site licenses instead of per-design licenses raises price. That’s partly because every reactor is built on site, and that’s part of why it’s a site license rather than a per-design license. There’s also plenty of delaying tactics used by the anti-nukes which substantially raises costs.
The ThorCon presentation compared a nuclear site to a large crude carrier, the largest ship ever made. That ship costs approx 100 million USD. A whole nuclear reactor like ThorCon is smaller, takes less steel, concrete, etc., and yet conventional nuclear reactors tend to cost 100x that (for the reasons I’ve already stated). A ThorCon will use approx 100 million USD of exotic materials, but still’s still a far cry away from what modern nuclear reactors are reported as costing. When you look at the cost of labor and cost of materials, there’s every reason to believe that it should be cheaper than coal. Not free – nowhere close – but still cheaper than coal.
20% of the US is nuclear, and has been for decades. From my perspective, it’s working great. France has been 80% approx nuclear for decades, also working great. Etc.
We need to fix it with technology that is proven or very likely to work. Solar and wind do not quality. Further, because of the thermodynamics analysis, it’s unlikely that solar or wind could ever work.
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No, it’s like an evolutionist saying that creationists are wrong, and there’s basically no chance that evolution is wrong. PZ Myers does this all the time, and he’s correct to do so. It doesn’t “shut down discussion”. Creationists are still free to present their arguments and reasons.
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Thank you Matrim.
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To numerobis
Still better than coal. Also, with modern reactor designs, that risk goes down substantially.
Wind and solar are only the cheapest if you ignore capacity factor, play games with interest and LCOE, and especially if you ignore problems of intermittancy, and especally if you ignore the thermodynamic insolvability of a majority wind and solar solution.
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No, but I want a whole, 100% solution right now, with technology that we know will work. I don’t care if it’s with a dozen different technologies, but I want to know how we’re going to provide that 20 terwatts of reliable power.
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I don’t know why you think that. Nuclear can do it alone. I don’t see how solar and wind help. Do you have an alternative solution without nuclear to provide 20 terawatts of power, that is doable, with minimal CO2 release, clean, and safe?
mostlymarvelous@92: Indeed, and you can use a lot of passive solar home techniques even beyond the climatic range where you start to need (or at least very strongly desire) active heating or cooling. Insulation and thermal inertia are good tricks to have no matter what. And there’s fun tricks when you’re using active techniques too: e.g. heat the floor, which provides more comfort for a given level of heating than you get from heating the air. Heat exchangers on your ventilation. Using a condensing dryer in winter (which doesn’t vent your heated air to the outside).
Its “part of” the solution, and, part of the design was to be able to set up light in the road, and other electronics, which one can presume may mean defrosting. But, yes, it might work better in a city than an urban area, but it still, even there, would reduce power use to “some” things. In any case, the point being to diversify the grid, and base what/how something is used on what is needed for the situation, instead of the current idiocy, which seems to be, “centralize it all, then charge people an arm and a leg for it.”
You still ain’t discussing science
To Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk-
Then what have I been doing with technical discussions of the physical details, money costs, energy costs, size of the problem, alternate aspects of the problem, often backed up by citations and further explanation? And what have you been doing, which AFAICT is entirely fact-free and argument free, except for a few obviously fallacious arguments (like overgeneralization, fallacious appeal to authority, etc.) ?
I don’t know what you expect from me. Maybe to appear before you, on my knees in supplication, with a sorry tone in my voice, with wavering and hesitation in my voice?
I believe that you are wrong. I believe that I have very good reasons for believing that you are wrong. I am not going to pretend to some have weaker level of confidence to make you feel better.
Do you have proper reasons why you believe that you are right which should be compelling when shared? That your favorite experts disagree with me is not terribly compelling. It’s not like evolution vs creationism, or global warming vs global warming denialism, where there actually is a consensus in academia. And even if there was a consensus in academia, often the proper way to handle an evolution denier or global warming denier is not by appeal to authority, but by citing the actual scientific evidence and arguments that convinced the experts in the first place, and that convinced you.
Well, obviously, all I needed to do is let you talk for long enough so you make my argument. There is no academic consensus, it’s not evolution vs creationism.
It’s a discussion of politics. And I’ve been having those for long enough to know that people who declare something to be “without alternative”* are usually just too lazy, ignorant or full of themselves to even think about the alternatives.
Sure, you have some nice arguments. And you can believe my arguments** to be wrong***
*it is funny that the person who declares things to be without alternative is the one who complaines about over-generalization
**actually I don’t think I’ve made many arguments here. I declined to discuss the pros and cons of various energy sources with you because why should I? I criticised your mode of discussion.
***Not that you’ve made a good case against the few I made. Handwaving doesn’t count.
It’s also a discussion of engineering.
We have a serious problem. We are talking about potential mass extinctions in the lifetimes of people alive today via ocean acidification, plus all of the other problems of global warming. We have a duty to not fuck the environment over for future generations. I would hope that you would take this more seriously and not rely on bad and fallacious reasoning. In this case – a combination of the fallacy fallacy and fallacious overgeneralization. At best, you’re using a pisspoor heuristic when the costs of not taking the correct action should demand better analysis.
The effect of your behavior is metaphorically sticking your head in the sand and hoping that the problem of global warming and ocean acidification goes away. I’m actually trying to fix the problem. Worse, not only are you sticking your head in the sand and not taking immediate actions to fix it, you’re taking a piss on seemingly the only solution to the problem with tech that is available now. You’re actually impeding the probably-only solution that we have. Your kind of irresponsible behavior risks billions of human lives and large portions of the biosphere.
I know you want something other than nuclear, that is clean, sustainable, with low environmental impact, that allows for individual ownership and decentralization, and so forth. You know what? I want a pony. ~sarcasm~ We don’t always get what we want.
AW, now I’m feeling bad. Just because I don’t want to discuss stuff with you in a comment thread on a blog means I’m single-handedly condemning large parts of humankind PLUS the polar bears.
If only we could harness that power…
Polar bears? Polar bears?
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/What+is+Ocean+Acidification%3F
Fuck you.
Also
http://www.newsweek.com/2014/07/11/disaster-weve-wrought-worlds-oceans-may-be-irrevocable-256962.html
MostlyMarvelous @ 92
“As for power consumption, building or retro-fitting houses to passivhaus or near-passivhaus standards is the way to go to reduce power demand for heating and cooling.”
This is not an easy step, at least in the USA. I’m building a house north of Atlanta (not to passivhaus standards) which is designed to be energy-efficient and well-sealed. It adds significantly to the cost of a new home for this ‘luxury.’ Tax credits are available to replace inefficient windows but not for new construction. Lenders do not care about energy efficiency – in their world there’s no ROI on insulation but there is on granite countertops. Building an energy-efficient house may require 25% down instead of 15%. My utility provider makes it as difficult as possible to do rooftop solar, even though it’s theoretically a member-owned cooperative. Right now the market pushes people to build cheaply and inefficiently, ending up with a house with a lifespan measured in decades.
I liked how you just brushed aside the Fuke exclusion zone as it was ok everyone moved away
where is the cost of decommissioning obsolete nuclear plants account for?
enlightened one
uncle frogy
opus
It’s not just the market. It’s the building regulations. There are plenty of regulations stipulating roof standards having to resist certain levels of wind. Others stipulate whether you must, or must not, have rainwater tanks or outdoor clothes drying or allow stormwater to flow to certain places … the list goes on, and the contents vary depending on where you live.
Whatever the list contains, banks and other lenders will not lend at all if a house does not meet legal minimum standards – whether that’s for the qualifications of plumbers and electricians, or as in New Zealand, double glazing (compulsory in most new dwellings).
To unclefrogy
Just as I have been accused of coming in with unjustified preconceived conclusions, I might accuse the same of you. What are you really looking for? Are your questions honest? Does anything I say actually matter?
For what it’s worth, and it’s probably very little for some of my audience here:
I didn’t “brush it [the Fukushima accident] aside”. I addressed it head-on. You simply didn’t like my answer. Again, it’s unfortunate, but it’s not worse than what coal does to our planet, and that’s the alternative. Further, the radiation in many areas of Fukushima are well within safe zones. Just like Chernobyl. The dangers of slightly elevated background radiation levels are grossly exaggerated. Further, modern reactor designs are much safer.
As for decommissioning costs. I don’t recall giving precise numbers on the costs of nuclear power, and thus your question doesn’t make sense. Admittingly, this question is not quite as bone-headed as your quips about transmission line losses – at this question about decommissioning costs is rooted in reality. Still, what is likely to happen here is I am would quote experts that I trust and have vetted, and you will reject my experts as unfit, and you will quote experts that you trust (and have hopefully vetted), and I’ll likely reject those experts as being unfit. Do you want me to play that game and start going into concrete numbers for particular plant designs? We can use ThorCon as an example which does involve a bit of guessswork, or we can use much more proven numbers concerning 40 year old designs. Of course, I could start citing non-European and non-US countries and their historical costs and contemporary costs. I strongly suspect none of these approaches will be satisfactory to both sides, but I’m willing to play along if that’s what you want. How would you like to approach this?
But again, before I spend my time on what I feel like would be a wasted effort, does this question even matter to you? Suppose you became sufficiently convinced that it was cheaper than coal – would that matter to you at all? Would you become pro-nuclear?
Rather, I suggest we focus on the big picture. What points do I need to make in order to convince you to be pro-nuclear? Let’s map out the landscape, and we can thus properly apportion our efforts, rather than what appears to be a kind of anti-nuclear Gish Gallop (throwing out so many points that the opponent doesn’t have time to properly respond, and/or an unfair tactic because it takes somenoe like me much, much longer to properly refute a point you can make in half a sentence).
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For fair play, to convince me to not be pro-nuclear, here are some following options.
Even ignoring global warming and ocean acidification, millions die every year from air particulate pollution, lack of access to drinking water, sanitation, and the other health improvements of cheap energy, and there’s just the quality of life that we in the west take for granted with cheap energy, including internet, cars, etc. I feel morally obliged to advocate for the expansion of nuclear power on just this point alone.
So, you might try to convince me that millions aren’t dying from air particulate pollution from coal, indoor heating with animal dung, lack of access to clean drinking water, etc. etc.
You might try to convince me that we can supply the needed terawatts of power with some other approach that involves little to no nuclear (and which is an alternative to the status quo, aka little to no coal). In which case, I want a clear outline how we are going to supply that approx 1 kilowatt of power to every person in the world (this includes aggriculture, electricity, water, sanitation, transportation, manufacture, etc.) – at least 100 watt. For renewables, I’m going to need a pretty concrete breakdown of the proportions of each technology that are going to make up the mix, of course allowing different mixes for different places, but those mixes need to be specified. For signification portions of local wind and solar and any other renewables, I need a description of how the intermittancy problem is overcome, or not overcome and if not overcome then how all of its other associated problems are overcome. For backing energy storage, I’m going to need some concrete answers on why the thermodynamic EROEI argument is wrong, or how it can be avoided.
And then there’s global warming and ocean acidificaiton.
You could try to convince me that I’m grossly exaggerating the potential threat.
You could try to provide a clean, reliable, plausible alternative source of energy that is going to supply that limestone CO2 sequestration process, which is going to take about 10 terawatts of power going for decades. This has similar problems to before.
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So, again, I ask you, what would it take to make you pro-nuclear? What is your list of hold-ups and reasons? Again, I don’t want to get bogged down in petty details if those petty details wouldn’t actually change your mind on energy policy.
mostlymarvelous* @ 105
“Whatever the list contains, banks and other lenders will not lend at all if a house does not meet legal minimum standards – whether that’s for the qualifications of plumbers and electricians, or as in New Zealand, double glazing (compulsory in most new dwellings).”
My concern is that additions above the minimal limits set by code are not valued if they improve energy efficiency but are if they contribute to a perception of luxury. Right now in Georgia a blower-door test is required but there is no value in achieving the passivhaus ACH standards; pass the test and you are golden. Spending above the code minimum is wasted in the eyes of the market. I paid a bundle for triple-glazed windows and it was a waste of money in almost everyone’s eyes except mine. I will probably never recover the money in my lifetime, unless the market changes significantly.
*My apologies for misspelling you ‘nym last post!
I asked a simple question and you dodged it in about ten paragraphs. Does that explain why you are not really taken seriously.
Who pays for the decommissioning of the nuclear power plants?
That is the question.
In case you want to bring up coal fired plants it is part of the none cash subsidy given to coal fired plants that they are not charged for their waste stream in any measure close to the cost to society and the environment nor are they required to treat it in a clean and safe way.
That is not unusual many industries are given a free ride in this regard. It helps to keep the cost to consumers down and the profits up for the producers but as we are now learning it adds to long term costs to society and the environment.
So who pays for the decommissioning?
uncle frogy
Nuclear, solar and wind share the basically same economic problem with some differences. All three are capital intensive and until large-scale energy storage is developed they will be run at full power all the time regardless of electricity demand. Nuclear power is only suitable for being the backbone to the electricity production, because it’s practically always run at constant power. Solar power production does follow approximately electricity demand in areas where air conditioning consumes significant amounts of electricity, elsewhere not so much.
Nowadays hydropower and fossil fuels are used for peak shaving. Water reservoirs do provide some energy storage, but you can’t build them willy-nilly.
I’m not opposed to solar, wind and nuclear power, quite the opposite, but the problems must be acknowledged. Here in Finland there’s a large (because permits are granted for reactor units, not generated power) nuclear power plant that’s been under construction since 2005. The plant was ordered on a turnkey basis from Areva which has extensive experience in building nuclear power stations. It was supposed to be ready in 2010, but the current estimate is that commercial power production should start in 2018. The construction was riddled with problems like shoddy workmanship and the cost overruns have been huge (the cost has been more than doubled) and Areva is in financial trouble due to the losses from the project. I’ve never opposed that particular plant, it seems to oppose itself quite effectively.
There isn’t a panacea for energy production. I’m for deployment and development of wind and solar power. Nuclear power should also be developed and used with very strict safety regulations, though the regulations should allow for more decentralized production with smaller reactor units. Better energy storage would make all three much more useful.
I’d be interested in the original data if you could find it again. That sounds not terribly unlikely–coal’s nasty and if the only possible options were coal and nuclear I’d definitely be all for nuclear–but I’d like to see what factors were being considered when determining environmental impact and also when the data were collected. The full extent of the damage from the Chernobyl disaster wasn’t immediately evident. Possibly it still isn’t evident. Possibly unrelated, but it seemed like there were a lot of people with bizarre cancers in Poland in the 2000s. Again, possibly not related at all, but I hope someone’s checking the epidemiology of that as well.
That being said, there are other alternatives besides nuclear or coal. My personal bias is that we shouldn’t absolutely throw out any option until we’re sure we’ve got things covered with better alternatives. A world where energy was produced with a combination of solar, wind, geothermal, carefully monitored nuclear, and fossil fuels for very select uses seems like our best alternative. From my definitely non-expert point of view, anyway.
This:
where is the cost of decommissioning obsolete nuclear plants account for?
Is seemingly a different question than this:
Who pays for the decommissioning of the nuclear power plants?
This second question is much simpler at first glance. My answer: Does it matter? I’m operating from the assumption of a command economy approach to solving the problems of global warming, ocean acidification, and the more mundane problems of providing clean indoor heating, clean indoor cooking, clean drinking water, refrigeration, etc.
The government could pay for it directly. Or the individual operating companies could be required by law to overcharge customers to provide for decomm funds. I really don’t understand how this might matter. I still don’t understand the point of your question.
You say I evaded. I’m sorry I didn’t understand the question, and I still don’t understand the question. However, it seems pretty clear that you evaded my questions. Do you have an open mind? Or are you wasting my time? What are your actual hang-ups? What would it take to convince you to become a pro-nuclear advocate?
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To Ice Swimmer
I’m sorry. You’re just misinformed.
Solar doesn’t actually follow load demand, even in places where air conditioning is big.
http://instituteforenergyresearch.org/solar-energys-duck-curve/
Solar production peaks at midday, when the sun is highest in the sky, whereas daily temperature peaks around 3 PM IIRC (the point in the day that is hottest is not midday), and residential energy demand in many places peaks around 7 PM, aka when people are getting home from work, and when the sun has already stopped shining for our purposes here. Of course, with moderate pumped-water storage which is economical in some places, the load can be shifted by a couple hours.
Further, let’s just assume for the moment that nuclear cannot load follow. (That’s false, but for the sake of argument for this paragraph.) Solar has the severe problem that it produces 0 power during the night, approx 0 power during winter for non-equitorial lattitudes (i.e. approx 1% daily average nameplate capacity for Germany), and greatly reduced power from clouds. That’s a severe intermittancy problem. Whereas, the load might vary by a factor of 2 throughout the day, and in the worst case scenario, you could solve that with nuclear by just overbuilding by 2x. No such approach is possible for solar because it’s a fundamentally different problem. Overbuilding by 10x is still not going to provide power at night, nor during winter for many lattitudes, and you’re going to need to overbuild by a lot just to handle a week of clouds and no wind (a common occurrance).
And further, nuclear can load follow. The idea that it cannot is a pernicious myth that needs to die. People should know better. Anyone who purports to be an expert and writes such is an idiot. For example, France is about 80% nuclear, and several of its nuclear plants do load follow.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Country-Profiles/Countries-A-F/France/
There’s lots of ways to modify nuclear power plants to load follow, and France has chosen some options. Depending on the design, there are lots of options, and some designs inherently load follow much better than others (such as MSRs).
Of course, the difference between load following nuclear and overbuilding nuclear isn’t that big. You still need to build enough capacity to meet the peak demand, and turn down the reactors during low demand daily periods. Given that most of the money cost of nuclear is the plant capital cost, approx 80% for pressurized light water reactors, the difference between overbuilding by 2x and “wasting electricity”, vs load following, is actually rather small. It’s the difference in the fuel cost savings, minus any additional wear-and-tear on the plant for load following.
Tangent: This is why natural gas plants are often used to load follow. The capital costs of natural gas plants is very cheap, but the fuel costs are high. The natural gas peaking plants are rarely used, can be cycled quickly, which means that the very low capital costs dwarf the higher fuel costs for this use case.
Could we please, pleas stop posting flagrantly false information that minutes with (a proper) google search could reveal?
Finally, as to your argument about nuclear power money costs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant
This is a well known fiasco, yes. I haven’t looked into it personally with sufficient detail, but many of the factors that I talk about in post 93 are applicable. Further, this is an unusual design. When you look at the problems, many of the problems are because it’s like a first-of-its-kind construction. As I mentioned, every nuclear power plant today is built on site, and it’s like a one-off project. If we managed to get this into assembly line production (such as the ThorCon shipyard scheme), we should expect drastically reduced prices. Further, once we get away from the high pressure vessel forgings which are incredibly expensive, incredibly slow, and a bottleneck to the entire process which means errors cause delays and drastically increase costs, then prices should go down further. And more, I’m reading about problems with the concrete. I’m guessing it’s rebar reinforced concrete or something similar, and from what little I know about such things, laying that kind of concrete is a huge mess, cannot be automated, is slow going, easy to get defects, etc. Unfortunately, it’s necessary because of the very high pressures involved, and so again if we move away from high pressure, construction costs should go down dramatically.
Are those the only two options? I certainly hope not, because global warming is pretty much an unavoidable given at this point and we’re going to have to find a way of dealing with it and limiting it. The only way nuclear power can help is in the “limiting it” area. Dealing with the changes in conditions for farming will likely require…GMOs.
That’s a pretty big “except”. Yes, of course I know that coal mining kills people too. As does drilling for oil. Heck, they probably kill through cancer, just like radiation. Again, if our options were nuclear and coal, I’d definitely go for nuclear, but those aren’t the only options. They may end up being both parts, but not all, of the solution.
Quoting dianne
Don’t get your information from Green Peace et al. They’re consumate liars on this topic. They are as bad as creationists.
In short, every respected medical organization, including the World Health Organization, says that deaths from Chernobyl are about 4 000. Whereas, Green Peace and many other so-called environmental groups regularly report the death toll from Chernobyl as ludicrously high, like 500 000 people.
For the non-expert, I would suggest the movie Pandora’s Promise, which goes into some of these details. Freely available on Netflix, and otherwise cheaply available legally online. First showing at the Sundance Film Festival, where I have been told it was positively received. Pandora’s Promise interviews several prominent and well-respected people in the so-called environmental movement; in particular they ask one about the seeming contradiction by their stance that we should trust academia when there’s a consensus on topics such as global warming, but simultaneously how this person could hold that Chernobyl is the biggest conspiracy medical cover-up of all time. It’s really quite striking the complete contradiction, their dogmatic devotion, to their faith-based position.
Just for example, the other day someone sent me a link saying that Thyroid cancer rates are up among the Japanese in Fukushima. Maybe 400 additional cancer deaths according to the story. My initial reaction was “well, shit. I’m not too surprised. Nuclear is still better than the alternatives.” Then I found another story that utterly demolished the first. It’s straight out of the creationist playbook – a complete and fundamental misunderstanding of proper scientific methods.
http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/issues/nuclear/nopetheres-no-thyroid-cancer-epidemic-in-fukushima
As the story opens:
This is the kind of culture we’re living in, where we hear about every incompetent study that nuclear power is dangerous, and we never hear about any study that demolishes the first kind. It’s also very similar to the anti-vaccer community and how they still cling to that one long-discredited study that purports that vaccines cause autism.
So, when you say something like:
The full extent of the damage from the Chernobyl disaster wasn’t immediately evident. Possibly it still isn’t evident.
You’re just adding to the misinformation and fear based on bullshit. We know precisely how bad it is, and anyone who says otherwise is peddingly in pseudo-scientific fear-mongering woo.
When you say something like:
Possibly unrelated, but it seemed like there were a lot of people with bizarre cancers in Poland in the 2000s.
You’re being just as bad as anti-vaccers in peddling complete bullshit, without basis, cultivating a climate of fear, against a very safe and useful technology (the analogy being nuclear power vaccines).
Just to drive this point home, as a factual matter, the original polio vaccine push in the US illed hundreds and permanently paralyzed thousands more. These deaths and paralsis was directly caused by the vaccine. This is not anti-vaccer propaganda. This is fact. The historical decision to vaccinate against polio was still the proper decision IMO. We need to put risks into the proper context, and compare risks to the alternatives.
Quoting dianne
Name one. That’s all I’ve been asking for. Explain how to get 20 terawatts of reliable, clean power without a majority nuclear solution. That’s 10 terawatts to get 1 kw for every person to raise them out of poverty, end needless deaths from entirely preventable causes, drop birth rates and cap population growth, etc., and another 10 terawatts to power the limestone CO2 sequestration process in order to prevent the nastier effects of climate change and ocean acidification.
To dianne
As I mentioned up-thread (several times might I add), this is not true.
http://www.cquestrate.com/the-idea/detailed-description-of-the-idea
We can dig up limestone, heat it to release CO2, capture that CO2 and pump it into basalt deposits where it will form chemically stable bonds over geologic timescales, take the reuslting lime, and dump the lime into the ocean, where it will absord CO2 and become limestone again, pulling CO2 out of the ocean and thereby also out of the atmosphere.
Again, as I mentioned above, the only catch is that this process will require a ginormous amount of energy. At a first approximation, we’re simply reversing the burning process, and so the energy required is approximately equal to the energy that we got out burning the fossil fuel in the first place. To a first degree of approximation, we will need 10 terawatts of power running for several decades. For comparison, wikipedia tells me that currently we only produce about 2.3 terawatts of electricity worldwide. This number is huge, but it’s not impossible. We need to build a large (1 GW) nuclear reactor, every day, for the next few decades. This is not impossible. Boeing and Airbus do this already for wide-bodied aircraft. Modular nuclear reactors would be similar.
I think we have enough political will to do it – we can reverse global warming and ocean acidification, and it wouldn’t even be that bad by money cost with no significant lifestyle changes. The only thing standing in the way is the goddamned “environmentalists” standing in the way because of their irrational fear of nuclear and their irrational devotion to solar and wind.
Thank you, Eric, that chart was helpful. Among other things, I note that the dose of radiation that a person in the exclusion zone would receive over 2 weeks is about that which is recommended by the EPA for a year for the general public, though somewhat under that which is considered acceptable for a worker in a nuclear plant and below the yearly exposure clearly related to increased cancer risk (100 mSv versus 26 mSv in the exclusion zone). So the exclusion zone did its job, keeping the public safe. That’s great, but it’s not clear to me how this chart demonstrates that the Fukushima disaster was anything other than that: a disaster.
Incidentally, my impression was that the problem with Fukushima was not the age of the plant or the design but the oversight: the government organizations that should have been inspecting the plant and ensuring that safety protocols were being followed had been bribed or coerced by the industry into not doing their job properly. So nuclear plants, even older ones, may be safe or not, but nothing, NOTHING, is safe when oversight is not being provided.
Who is “we” and what is the evidence that we have the political will or even the engineering capacity to do this? For that matter, where are the fissionables going to come from? Does the earth even have enough highly radioactive material to build plants to that extent? I suppose one side benefit might be that we could strip nuclear weapons for fissionable materials, rendering them harmless and the threat of nuclear war less…but who’s going to give theirs up first?
Hang on. Does this mean that the bonds will last over geologic timescales or will take geologic timescales to form? And why burn limestone to release CO2 when we’ve already got more CO2 in the air than is good for us? I know it’s still a tiny fraction of the air, but if we’re talking grand scale engineering anyway, why not work on some way to filter the CO2 out of the air, concentrate it, and inject that into basalt?
I am glad you finally came right out and said it. It has been lurking in the background of all you have been saying all along.
just an other authoritarian who knows what’s best sorry but my parents are dead I do not need any replacements. Until the new Politburo takes command I and everyone else gets a say in what we do.
there is more than one way to skin a cat!
uncle frogy
To unclefrogy
You’re being highly unreasonable. You don’t seem to understand what the technical term “command economy” means. It’s simply the opposite of unrestrained capitalism. Government funded health care – that’s an example of a command economy. Is that totalitarian? Jesus Christ.
To Dianne
My understanding is that when you inject CO2 into basalt deposits, the CO2 should form chemically stable bonds within a “short time”, and it will remain that way. My sloppy language was to contrast that to other plans where we inject CO2 into old nat gas and oil chambers, plug it up, and hope it doesn’t leak in the next X years, which seems to be quite foolish IMHO. I meant to make the point that we need it to be stable on geological timescales. Aka we shouldn’t pass the buck to the next generations, which is what would happen if these things start leaking. No, we need something chemically stable.
As to your question pulling it out of the air. This comes up during discussion of generating synthetic hydrocarbon fuels. Earlier processes such as Green Freedom were deemed overpriced because the extraction of CO2 out of the air is too costly. However, CO2 is approx 100x more dense in seawater. CO2 in the air dissolves in seawater at the air-ocean boundary, until it reaches equilibrium. That CO2 then mixes with the seawater to produce a (mild) acid, which is why the ocean’s ph is becoming more acidic, which might threaten mass extinctions in the near future when the ocean becomes too acidic for certain forms of common sea life. So, what the US Navy released is that CO2 is much more dense in the water, and so it might be practical to extract CO2 out of seawater.
http://www.zmescience.com/research/us-navy-synthetic-jet-fuel-seawater-0423432/
They’re looking at this to find a way to produce aircraft fuel on the aircraft carrier itself with nuclear electricity in order to solve supply line problems. I also like the idea because it might produce CO2 neutral gasoline / petrol in an economically reasonable price, and thereby solve the problem of transportation. Nuclear electricity to gasoline, and we keep the same infrastructure and cars that we have today. Batteries might solve some residential communiting, but it’s unlikely to be able to replace trucking, and it’s definitely not going to replace the fuel for aircraft.
But moving on. The Aesop, or point, of this story is that we should be looking to extract CO2 out of seawater, not air.
Now, how do we do that? As you suggested, we need a filter. Lime makes a very excellent “filter”. It will naturally suck up that CO2 in the water, and form limestone. How do we get enough lime? By heating up limestone to create lime and CO2. Of course, that produces a bunch of CO2. However, because it will be pre-concentrated, we might be able to do something with it that we couldn’t do with the unconcentrated CO2 in the atmosphere and ocean. That’s where the basalt deposits come in.
It’s the best plan by far I’ve heard in order to pull large amounts of CO2 out of the air. Only costs a shitton of money and 10 terawatts for many decades, or probably a few centuries.
…
Yep.
http://energyfromthorium.com/energy-weinberg-1959/
Literal everyday rock, granite rock, is the most common constituent rock of the crust of this planet (continental crust at any rate). With a fuel efficient reactor, like many of the next-gen reactors, average rock contains enough uranium and thorium to make that piece of rock contain more useful energy than the same volume of coal times 20. We are never going to run out of rock. We are never going to run out of nuclear fuel. The sun is going to expand and kill all life on Earth before we run out of rock.
I must add – in the near term (millenia), if we go with a thorium-uranium breeder, we will get enough thorium fuel as a byproduct of rare earth metal mining. We won’t need even one nuclear fuel mine for a very long time. Existing mining will provide enough.
Where’s the money coming from? It’s not coming from private investors… Just how much money are we talking about here, anyway?
Although… maybe going directly to just putting ground basalt into the ocean is better.
http://2greenenergy.com/2015/08/23/geoengineering-the-oceans/
No idea right now. I need to do more research.
Also, one version of the earlier lime proposal in more detail:
http://www.timothymaloney.net/www.timothymaloney.net/Virgin_Earth_Challenge.html
Government taxes, almost certainly, assuming it ever happens.
How much money? Depends on what assumptions you make. Let’s make some wild-ass guesses.
10 terwatts
2000 USD / kw capital costs
= 20 trillion U.S. dollars
For comaprison: Total US federal budget: Maybe 3.5 trillion USD. Cost of the Iraq war: 1.7 trillion USD, with maybe an additional 6 trillion USD in benefits to war veterens.
Of course, on the bright side, this is a one-time cost, and we can spread the cost over the coming decades, and presumably we should get other countries to chip in too.
Still, compared to all of the money that we’re spending on wars for oil, and the probable costs of ocean acidification, it’s within the realm of plausibility. It’s still supremely expensive.
I admit I need to do more research into this. Previously, for me, it was enough at the time to know that it could be done. Now I’m looking into what is actually the best way of going about it. I don’t know right now.
From what I’m reading now, it might be a lot better to take a volcanic island made primarily out of basalt, and more or less bulldoze the entire island, grind it up into small bits, and put that into the ocean, (or do that to large portions of a dozen islands or a hundred islands made out of basalt), so that the basalt reacts with CO2 in the water and sequesters it, to reverse ocean acidification and global warming. That might be less energy and less money than the limestone scheme. The limestone scheme uses lime as an intermediary, whereas we could just bring the basalt directly to the ocean.
Dunc @121,
Not a scientist nor economist nor maths expert in any sense but here’s our best shot at answering the latter question FWIW. Corrections are always welcome if we screwed something up here.
According to multiple sources (e.g., U.S. Energy Information Administration, etc.) the cost of building a nuclear power plant is in the range of US$4500/kW. For a 1 GW plant that would cost around US$4.5 billion. Presumably this cost would be trending down over time and there would be savings from economies of scale if the world starts building them at the rate Enlightenment Liberal has suggested.
EL claims the world needs 20 TW. According to this site, there are (as of July 2015) 438 operating nuclear reactors and 67 new ones under construction worldwide. The current generating capacity of the operational plants is in the range of 380,000 MW. If we estimate an additional 67,000 MW from the plants currently under construction that would be a grand total of around 447,000 MW or 0.447 TW. Let’s round it up to 0.5 TW to make it easier. Which would mean we need to build enough new plants to provide an additional 19.5 TW.
Assuming our maths is correct (not a safe assumption so please check it) and using a $4500/kW estimate, it would cost just shy of US$88 trillion to build enough new nuclear plants to reach 20 TW capacity worldwide. By way of comparison the total worldwide GDP in 2014 was about US$78 trillion (source). EL has suggested these plants need to be built over the next few decades so presumably that US$88 trillion would be spread over that time period which would mean spending roughly 1/25 (give or take) of the world’s GDP on this project each year for the next 30 years.
EL does that sound about right? At least as a ROM estimate?
of course we do not have to do anything with the obsolete plants when they are done. the expense just ends when we shut them off.?
All of that money that 88 trillion is to be payed to who? It will go to private contractors operators? I.E. utilities and construction companies profits who are owned by the share holders in the end. (the 1%)
in the calculations why do you seem to be insisting that all of your projected need for power have to come from one source?
uncle frogy
electric power is a wonderful thing and we can do many seemingly magical things with it. Unfortunately we are coming to understand that there are some great long term costs in the ways we generate that power in the form of dangerous toxic chemicals and excessive C02 production and its atmospheric effects. Since we failed to include those costs into the price of the electricity we have enjoyed in fact an artificially low price, cheap power. That did not encourage efficient use of that power. Does anyone really doubt that the increasing sales of electric and hybrid cars would happen if fuel was still .50 a gallon?
how would demand be effected if we dropped all of the supports and added all of the long term costs to the electrical power market up front instead of pushing it all off on the future tax payers?
uncle frogy
Yeah, that sounds about right.
Quibbles: I hope to reduce those capital costs by at least a factor of 2, maybe 3x or 4x with some luck, for all of the reasons that I stated up-thread. I believe that this is a reasonable hope. That would put us slightly cheaper than coal. Also, it’s possible that CO2 sequestration might be a lot cheaper than I first expected – I really need to look into this with more detail – so maybe we only need in the neighborhood of 10 terawatts total instead of 20 terawatts. Again, not sure on that point. With these adjustments, we’re getting to the neighborhood of 1% GDP per year, and that’s much more reasonable and also in line with current societal expenditures for energy, wars for oil, etc.
…
Quoting unclefrogy
Again, I’m not trying to say we should ignore proper cleanup and decommissioning. The prices being quoted include such things. What I am pointing out is that every energy source needs to be refurbished and rebuilt after its lifetime, which means that maintaining 10 terawatts indefinitely would mean a recurring constant upkeep cost. I was merely pointing out that this need not continue indefinitely into the future. Maybe only for about a century. Maybe half a century. Depends on the numbers, assumptions, etc.
Wherever any public works money goes, whether that’s roads, railroads, public health care, etc. I agree that we need better wealth redistribution programs in this country, but I also think it’s extremely silly to imply that all public works programs must necessarily move money from the poor to the rich.
I really wish you would read what I have already written. Here, let me copy-paste for you.
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Quoting unclefrogy
For any plan that has a snowballs chance in hell of being passed in all of the countries of the world, energy demand is going to continue to rise. Remember, lareg chunks of the world are operating without electricity and modern energy consumption. As I tried to explain, getting just a little bit of electricity is a matter of life and death to people without electricity, for indoor cooking and heating, for refrigeration for food, for agriculture fertilizer, etc.
IIRC, the energy usage per capita of the US is around 2 to 2.5 kw. Whereas California and most of Europe are round 1 kw. I think that aiming for 1 kw per person is a reasonable number. However, if we aim for that number, that means 1 kw * 10 billion people = 10 terawatts right there, and again for comparison today we have about 2.3 terawatts of electricity production, and according to someone upthread, only about 0.5 terawatts nuclear electricity production. This also assumes that we get the US to go to reasonable energy efficiency standards like Europe and California.
As I tried to explain, getting just a little bit of electricity is a matter of life and death to people without electricity, for indoor cooking and heating, for refrigeration for food, for agriculture fertilizer, etc.
Also clean drinking water. That’s important. Basic sanitation measures. “Luxury items” like sewage treatment. The list goes on.
Excuse me, when / where has this been demonstrated?
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Giliell, various
I get the impression you skimmed as far as seeing the mention two weeks for one of the entries, and then stopped reading. Did you catch the bit in the panel below, where it shows further information relating to Fukushima?
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From memory, their numbers came from simply attributing every subsequent cancer case to the disaster.
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A nuclear reactor built every day?? Nope sorry, that’s impossible.
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a) My name is Holms.
b) There is no commenter called Eric in this thread, so I have no idea how you got that name!
Your “somewhat under” the yearly dose limit of a nuclear plant worker is a strange way of saying one fiftieth.
The point of the chart was not to claim that Fukushima was peachy and fine, the point was to combat the sometimes ludicrous exaggeration some outlets indulged in back then.
Thanks for your contribution to the thread. Do you have any hope for fusion to power carbon sequestration? I guess that depends on time to develop and deploy lots of fusion and the cost of fusion power?
As soon as you get away from the crazy high pressures and the required crazy one-piece steel forgings that go along with it, it becomes possible, very possible indeed.
http://thorconpower.com/docs/exec_summary2.pdf
http://thorconpower.com/docs/domsr.pdf
It’s not crazy at all. It’s quite doable. And modestly too. Assuming we can get these costs to something reasonable based on labor and materials, it should be cost competitive with coal. When you’re looking at how much coal the world is already planning on building, and when you calculate the costs of what those coal plants should cost based on labor, materials, and fuel, it’s not crazy at all.
The Nightly Show just covered Woodland in the 12/16 episode…and sadly, they went whole hog with the idea that the people of Woodland think solar panels will suck up all the sunlight. I guess telling the truth and dispelling media distortions isn’t nearly as fun as branding a whole down as scientifically illiterate.
EL @ 111
My point wasn’t that you can’t load-follow with nuclear power plants. You can, but nobody does today it if they can avoid it (the French apparently can’t). The mismatch between solar production peak and electricity demand peak is larger than I thought (I knew that temperature peaks in the afternoon and solar radiation at noon plus photovoltaics produce more power before noon than in the afternoon because maximum power point voltage is lower if the cell is hotter.).
The lesson from the Olkiluoto fiasco is that you can lose billions if you screw up just one big nuclear project. Areva fired their CEO (Anne Lauvergeon) and may need a bailout.
I’m all for more flexible and lower investment cost nuclear power if it’s safe. Today’s commercial nuclear power is best suited for being run at full power with little flexibility. Solar and wind aren’t flexible today.
Holms
Well, you’Re wrong. And how is that relevant to my argument?
So far I’ve seen a lot of handwaving but nobody adressed the point I was making: You don’t simply change your units when putting things next to each other in order to comapre them. Unless, of course, you want to make people take in the visual information quickly and misleadingly without doing the fine mental calculations.
I did not even make any argument about whether the actual fallout from Fukushima is generally exagerated or downplayed. I said that this chart makes it look smaller by doing that trick with the different time units.
Giliell@135: You are correct that the numbers used are confusing, but I feel it is a little unfair to Randell Monroe to suggest that it was done deliberately to mislead.
The version linked here was produced the month after the disaster, and the point of chart as explained here was to provide context for the numbers the media was reporting at the time. The initial version of the chart contained one Fukashima-related number, and that was for a one-day duration at the monitoring site.
The two weeks number looks like it assumes that the person receiving the dose evacuated when the ‘shelter in place’ instructions was upgraded to ‘voluntary evacuation’. Unfortunately, I can’t trace where the ‘typical dose inside the Fukushima Exclusion zone’ number came from. A number of the chart sources only exist in archive form, and my Japanese isn’t good enough to try and navigate the archived form of the Ministry’s website. ( I can only find the information for the monitoring site outside of the exclusion zone.)
There are likely far, far better sources on the radiation measurements over time for Fukushima than this graph, which hasn’t been updated since April 2011.
Shorter EL: I’m not against using a mix of technologies, I’m just going to hold it against technologies that can’t be used as 100% of the mix.
Why bother arguing with that logic?
To numerobis
Put words in my mouth if you wish. I don’t know what to say to someone who so openly calls me a liar. Obviously you know my position better than I do, and so there’s no reason to talk further with you (snark).
What word did I put in your mouth? What is this one:
Or this one:
Or this one:
Or this one:
Or this one:
Or this one:
There’s literally nowhere in this “discussion” that you allow any space for any technology except nuclear, unless that technology can 100% replace nuclear.
I can simultaneously hold the following two beliefs without contradiction:
1- I would endorse a solution that is a mix of “green” and non-nuclear technologies that can meet my requirements of human safety, reliability, near 100% uptime in aggregate, abundance / sustainability, energy production effectiveness (by EROEI measure or similar), reasonable money-cost, and target worldwide power in the neighborhood of 10 or 20 terawatts. The mix could be a combination of a dozen technologies – each producing around 10% of the total power. The mix could vary by region. I don’t care, as long as it works (meets my stated requirements).
2- There is no such green and non-nuclear solution that is readily available for mass deployment now, and IMO it seems unlikely that we will get one tomorrow, or the next decade, or the next century.
My belief “there is no such solution” is held tentatively, just like all proper empirical and scientific beliefs. It is subject to being overturned when presented with sufficient and compelling evidence.
Again, when you say this:
I have said nothing to this effect, and I have said many things explicitly and clearly to the contrary. I have been exceedingly clear on this point. I do not know how I could possibly be clearer. The fault of bad communication is entirely yours. Whether the fault is due to maliciousness, or due to incompetence and negligence, I do not know. It does not matter much to me right now. Shape up.
I can’t read your mind in which you hold thoughts completely contrary to what you actually wrote. Mea maxima culpa.
like most people who are absolutely sure they are correct and everyone else is wrong because reasons they seldom hear what they actually say.
I was asked what would make me pro-nuclear.
OK it is really simple, from my experience people are often lazy, stupid and criminal.
We are prone to making small mistakes all the time and have accidents.
In theory nuclear power might be possible and your prescriptions could work.
With people in the mix things get more complicated however. besides the cost which has been shown repeatedly to be underestimated, cost overruns are common as are mistakes. We have a reactor out here at San Onofre that will never work again because of a mistake.
To make the fallible people problem worse is the fact that the radiation the very thing that makes the things work is very dangerous and can not yet be made safe to handle or even be close to for an extremely long time in human scale. There is no place we can safely put it and guarantee it for 100,000 years in theory maybe but people again are involved in every step of the way along with the chance of a catastrophic accident which would generate even more dangerously contaminated material to dispose of. We simply have no experience with time frames like that hell we have only been farming for at most 14,000 years and look at the mess we often make doing that.
Mistake and accidents will happen at what rate are they acceptable what is the number?
When any other steel and concrete structure reached the end of it’s useful life it is a simple matter to grind up and reuse the concrete for other construction and cut up the steel with oxy-propane torches and send it right back to the mill to be made into new steel products same with most material, it is made of except maybe the asbestos insulation from older plants.
it is messy but not that complicated and it can go rather quickly. not so with these 1000’s of nuclear plants, they are complicated and slow in order to control the danger. I am not aware of any that have not just been mothballed in place or entombed since we do not have anyplace to put the waste and it looks likely that we will not find one any time soon.
you guarantee safety of the plants and the waste stream then talk to me.
uncle frogy
To numerobis
None of your quotes of me in post 139 say what you purport I said in post 137.
I mean, fucking hell, you quoted this:
In defense of this strawman:
Did you even fucking read what you quoted before you posted 139?
Seriously, you’re a fucking dishonest asshat. Just back the fuck down already, admit your error, and we can move on.
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To unclefrogy
I’m responding to post 142.
Thank for the (seemingly) honest reply. (EDIT: I think I failed.)
I’ll try to keep my reply short.
Concerning the nuclear waste issue, you’re making a mountain of a molehill. I like my stand-by “for the sake of argument” plan. Suppose we did the following, seemingly insane, plan: Dump all of the radioactive waste into random spots in the ocean, completely unprotected. Let’s suppose we accurately measured total human deaths from this plan caused by radiation poisoning, cancer from increased radiation exposure, toxic metal poisoning, etc., caused as a result of this plan, over millions of years. It’s almost certain that the number of deaths in the real world this year from coal from just the airborne particulate pollution and other standard airborne chemical pollution, aka no CO2 or global warming considerations, will vastly outnumber the deaths from the seemingly insane plan of random-location, unprotected, ocean dumping. The amount of waste from nuclear power is so small compared to all other alternatives, that once you put it into the proper prospective, it’s a non-issue. Remember, coal kills millions every year, and you’re not demanding an immediate end to coal like you are for nuclear; regular operation of one coal plant is guaranteed to kill far far more in one year than even the worst accident at a nuclear power plant could (as evidenced by Fukushima and Chernobyl).
For further reading on the nuclear waste non-issue, I suggest the following:
A short, 3 – 4 page text:
http://thorconpower.com/docs/ct_yankee.pdf
A much longer read that goes into some of the math, seeming with some citations. I’ve skimmed it, and it looks legit.
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter11.html
Concerning the money-cost issue. People who attack nuclear on this point are simply not being reasonable. With so little nuclear plant construction, and especially concerning some of the particular nulcear plants discussed in this thread, they are like first-of-a-kind construction. Of course first-of-a-kind construction are going to hit unexpected problems, including design problems, manufacturing quality control problems, etc. A fair comparison would be comparing these first-of-a-kind nuclear plants to solar panels from 10 or 20 years ago. Today, we see that solar panels money prices have plummeted, and many solar advocates will just assert that prices will continue to fall without thinking, but they will not grant the same reasoning to nuclear – they won’t grant that increased production will drive prices down, like it does for all economies of scale and learning curves. Further, they’re engaging with the folder reactor designs, not the newer low-pressure designs, and for the reasons I’ve already stated, we should expect a drastic price reduction for the low-pressure designs compared to current high-pressure designs.
EnlightenmenLiberal, have you considered this option:
In an era where reducing the acidification of oceans is being solved by using electricity, the inability of solar and wind to be regulate to follow demand is no longer a problem. Because any surplus energy, at any time can be deployed to trap CO2 into more stable forms. There are certainly conceivable technolgies for this – grinding and heating of limestone could be done automatically during high energy production, or there could be build semi-automatic air-distillation facilities that use this energy for making dry ice and liquid nitrogen (which can be used subsequently to power motors btw.) from air etc. Those are solutions that are technologically possible right now, and on cursory glance it does not seem like their logistics is much more complicated than for your solution.
To me it seems that this particular argument against solar and wind (that the cannot follow demand and have huge fluctuations) does not hold water in your scheme.
As a chemist I have a question (I could search, but you seem to have read a lot so perhaps you can point me faster) – is in any of the proposed solutions on de-acidification of oceans considered:
1) dumping fine ground lime directly into the oceans. It will not reduce the PH as effectively, but it wouldl do it with much lower production energy costs.
2) dumping fine ground shales directly into the oceans. Shales erosion is after all natures way of reducing atmospheric CO2
To state my opinion on this, I think that nuclear will play significant role in next decades, but the solution will be a mix of technologies across the board. And it will not come as quickly as desired no matter whatwe do, because clima deniers succeeded in stalling for too long and now it is too late.
Damn, despite proofreading a typo: “fine ground limestone directly into the oceans
You bring up the pollution caused by coal as if it is OK It is not OK. Coal has been getting a free ride in essence a subsidy of reduced costs of production the energy produced is then sold too cheap so that does not in any way make nuclear energy good.
Your cavalier dismissing the waste problem with just dump in the ocean you wont even be able to tell if it does anything argument is also D.O.A.
the cost issue is again not addressed
You wonder why it is hard to get these things done
and why your only hope is if the government does it because there is not much appetite in the market for investing in nuclear energy
uncle frogy
@144 Charly
You still need a base system that can handle the load for times when the sun isn’t shining and/or the wind isn’t blowing. Unless you can solve the problem of energy storage and/or the massive transmission problem of moving solar energy halfway around the world and/or wind power from wherever there is more wind to where there is less. So atm, you’re still stuck with the need of an alternative system that can pick up the slack when (probably most of the time) wind and solar fails to deliver. The best candidate for a backbone of a general purpose energy grid is still nuclear.
@146 unclefrogy
Because “the market” always makes the best long term investments for things that really start paying off when half the shareholders are already dead, and totally not because they can sell the produced energy (while in reality it comes from other sources much of the time) at a markup once they call it “green”. /eyeroll Yeah, go on – trust the invisible hand of the market, it’s never failed us before has it?
To Charly
You say I didn’t quote the limestome method. I quite clearly did, several times.
At this moment, I’m highly dubious of using energy to create liquid CO2 and liquid nitrogen to later run a heat engine, for many reasons.
Concerning liquid CO2 in particular – because CO2 has such a small density in air, it is probably cost prohibitive to do this. For further reading, google “The Green Freedom” method and similar air-extraction methods, and the related papers which show that the cost is very probably too extreme for CO2 extraction from the air. That’s why I’m much more hopeful concerning the recent US navy research (cited up-thread) which does CO2 extraction from seawater where it’s a hundred times more dense compared to air.
Concerning both schemes – heat engines are very inefficient. For example, your car gasoline engine is maybe 20% efficient, and coal heat engines (steam turbines) are maybe 40 or 45% efficient at best. The efficiency is directly tied to the temperature difference between the hot spot and the cold spot. In order to get the 45% coal efficiency, you need quite a bigger temperature difference than you’re going to get with liquid CO2 and liquid nitrogen. Using this approach as a battery storage technology is almost certainly very bad because of the extreme round-trip energy losses that we’re talking about – very bad compared to compared to other alternatives, which are already bad.
With round trip energy losses this small, that means you need to overbuild by an appropriate factor. If you have 20% round trip efficiency, then you need to overbuild the part that powers the storage by 5x. That has money costs and manufacture energy costs involved (EROEI problem).
http://bravenewclimate.com/2014/08/22/catch-22-of-energy-storage/
Further, remember that for many things, it’s not the cost of the fuel or the input electricity which dominates the money costs (and energy costs for manufacture); it’s the capital money costs that dominates. (and energy costs for manufacture of the capital). That’s why the intermittancy problem is so severe. effectively what you’re doing now with the liquid CO2 and liquid nitrogen approach is offering another battery technology, and it’s going to fail miserably.
The inherent problem with most / all storage technologies to cover the intermittancy of wind and solar is that 50% or 80% or whatever percent of the time (depends on the final mix of energy production), your capital is going to be sitting idle. For many storage technologies, they have a lifetime that is not solely measured in terms of recharge cycles, but also just in terms of simple lifetime ignoring usage patterns. That means you’re paying a shitton of money (and energy for manufacture) for a bit of technology that is going to be rarely used. In effect, you’re “wasting” most of the money and input energy.
I quoted about 10 terawatts above as the estimate I’ve heard for the limestone process to just break even with the CO2 that we produce currently. Even if we stop all CO2 emissions right now, we have a shitton of backlog CO2 in the air that we still need to handle. The capital to extract that CO2, dump it into underground storage (preferrably basalt deposits), and to heat that limestone, and to mine that limestone, etc., is going to be very expensive in money and manufacture energy, and under your plan its “capacity factor”, aka the amount of time used as a fraction of its total existence lifetime, is going to be very small, which means to hit our target CO2 numbers, you’re going to need 5x or 10x more capital to reach the same CO2 extraction rates when it’s only being run 10% or 20% of the time. This will have huge money cost issues, and it’s going to have huge manufacture energy cost issues.
Further, many industrial processes cannot run just 10% or 20% of the time, especially heat-intensive processes. Just to give an example, the method that is used to manufacture almost all flat glass in the world is the float glass method.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Float_glass
My uncle works for Guardian, one of the few float glass manufacturers left in the United States. In short, the process involves heating up the constituents of glass to high temperatures to get it to melt and mix, and then to pull some of that liquid over a bath of molten tin – that’s how you get such exact flat-ness. Over Thanksgiving dinner a few years ago, he described what he’s going to be doing on the job for the next several months. They are going to do regular maintenance on the thing, which involves stripping it down, taking it apart, inspecting for wear, fixing and replacing as needed, putting it back together, and turning it back on. The part that’s relevant for this conversation is that it will take 2 months to turn back on. 60 days. It takes that long to heat the thing up from cold to operating temperatures, and to do so safely without damaging the quipment – raising the temperature too fast causes large temperature differences in the equipment, which leads to heat stress, which will cause damage. This is not something that you can just power when you feel like it. It needs power 24×7, no exceptions. Any outrages at all have real risks of causing long-lasting damage. I didn’t ask – I forgot to, but they must have backup diesel generators on site in case of grid outages in order to protect the equipment (protect the equipment by keeping the heat on).
Aluminum refining is very similar too. Any power outages will destroy the equipment.
I’m going to bet the process that heats up limestone, captures the CO2, and produces lime, is very similar. I’m going to bet that it’s not just something that you can turn on and turn off whenever you happen to have spare electricity from solar and wind. Heat industrial processes simply do not work that way.
I’m sorry, your plan won’t work. You don’t have the proper basic knowledge. (To be fair, many so-called environmentalists don’t. That’s the problem.)
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To unclefrogy
I did address the waste issue. I argued that the amount of people that would actually die is so small that it’s going to be less than the number of people who will die choking on bread in that same amount of millions of years. That’s right – it’s probably safer than sliced bread. It’s simply a non-issue. I did address it – you just don’t like the answer, for reasons that are inexplicable to me.
Further, even with the waste problems, it’s still better than any alternative. Like in all things, you pick the least evil alternative.
Also, the cost issue was addressed, but again you don’t like the answers, and again for reasons that are inexplicable to me.
Are you some kind of free-market libertarian fool?
Well, I do not oppose nuclear, I do not claim to have extensive knowledge on this particular topic, so thanks for the answers.
no I am not a libertarian and no I do not trust the market to make the best choices. I live in the real world the way it works here and now.
I am not an economist I have to use software to do my books but I listen to what the investing community says and no they make mistakes.The market is not stepping up to invest in nuclear energy that is a fact right now. There are just too many issues that are not settled in practice regardless of what theory may claim. One of the main issues is the waste problem which includes the issue of liability.
that is where it is today so where is all of this money going to come from to build these systems? The government is what you propose, a command economy is your assumption. A new agency or a revamped department then with a vast budget and a time line that stretches on forever (100;s of years). Will it have taxing authority or will it charge a realistic price for the energy it produces? Unlike current practices where a part of the budget of the producers is devoted to law suits and lobbying to keep from having to pay for the pollution effects from existing plants so they wont have to raise prices to cover the true cost of producing. or so they say. (tobaco companies)
Cost overruns are so common in defense contracts where we see something similar that it is almost a joke and the ability to control the cost is about as hard as nailing snot to the wall and this is what is the alternative. and you wonder why there is skepticism.
uncle frogy
And yet, you make standard libertarian talking points:
This is sounding pretty libertarian.
On to some of the points:
Those investment companies don’t have to pay for all of their externalities.
Those investment companies also don’t plan for time scales on decades or centuries. The system in place makes them plan primarily for the next quarter (year), or maybe the next year – at most the next decade.
Similarly, private investments often want quick returns, and they’re generally not interested in something that has payout measured in decades.
Further, the regulatory environment in the US for nuclear is uncertain, and where there is some certainty, it’s ridiculous. No one wants to invest in such an environment. That’s why left to private markets, ThorCon made an agreement with the Indonesian government, and not with the US government or some private investor in the US government.
And again, in the real world, the waste issue is completely and ridiculously overblown. If we applied the same safety standards to all technologies, we wouldn’t have any power generation. In the real world, nuclear operation and solar panel operation (including manufacture, installation, decommissioning and recycling) are about as toxic and dangerous, or solar is more toxic and more dangerous. In a sane world, we wouldn’t be building solar panels because of how toxic they are. We live in a ridiculous world, where solar panel manufacturers don’t face liability in court for their toxic pollution, and coal plants don’t face civil liability when they actually kill millions worldwide, but nuclear plants face ridiculous civil liability, in part because the court system is broken, and in part because of the extreme misinformation in the public.
In other words, nuclear waste is not an issue, and it’s not going to kill anyone (at least no more than any normal industrial practice, like solar panel construction and recycling). Nuclear waste is not magic. It’s just one form of “toxic” waste, just like any other form of toxic waste. Again, it’s not magic. Radiation is not magic. Plenty of other industrial processes produce much, much more toxic waste, like solar panel manufacture. The amount of nuclear waste is so small that it is easily handleable. Anything else is simple ignorance and fearmongering.
Regarding defense contracts. Yes, this is what happens in certain public works projects when the people managing it are incompetent or improperly rewarded / motivated, and when the regulations in place are ridiculous. The ThorCon website has an excellent short story on this, comparing two ships, one US Navy military, and one civilian, and the ridiculous and extreme price overruns and failures in manufacture.
http://thorconpower.com/library/documents
A Tale of Two Ships:
http://thorconpower.com/docs/two_ships.pdf
A rational look at the costs of a nuclear power plant show that nuclear power plant construction is suffering from the same sort of cost overruns and failures as this US Navy ship. When you look at the civilian sector, we see that a larger ship actually works, is much larger, has much higher uptime, at a fraction of the total money cost. The US Navy almost certainly paid 30x more for their ship than what they should have, and the ship doesn’t even work.
The story to take away from this is that if the people managing the product are incompetent, or if the improper motivations are in place, or if the regulations are obscene, then the result can be ridiculous price overruns, safety failures, and product failures.
The solution to government inefficiencies and failures is not automatically “no government”. Sometimes the solution is “better government”.
When you look at what it actually takes to construct a nuclear reactor, you see that it is experiencing ridiculous cost overruns, and many are the same kinds of cost overruns that the US Navy experienced with that ship.
And I don’t even know why I’m engaging with you. I’m simply repeating myself. Remind me to not post again if you don’t raise any novel new points.
come on container ships or oil tankers are not military ships they have completely different specs. how are they comparable?
I think all industries and all sectors of the economy should be held to the same standards with regards to pollution and environmental effects.
Yes other industries produce dangerous waste no argument but I think it is possible that most of them can be made safer through the use of creative chemistry, compounds can be broken down to there smaller constituents and /or bound up to much less active molecules. How do you reverse or control atomic decay so as to stop the release of radiation particles? (the toxic part)
What do you do with spent fuel? and for how long? what do you do with the no longer functioning plants where parts of them those closest to the fuel are now also radio-active waste
If the waste is so much not a problem why don’t you go live in an exclusion zone. or explain just how we clean it up or do we just right those areas off.
how do you guarantee that this new government department with such a massive budget will just be “better government”. When has that ever happened? Where have you seen any where in history where that kind of money was being spent that it did not attract criminal misappropriation or a huge bureaucracy that this would surely develop into not have it’s fair share of incompetence, laziness , corruption and greed.
It just sounds like command economy science fiction to me.
uncle frogy
Such as by chemical reprocessing to split out the long lived waste and put it back in the reactor to be destroyed, and taking the remaining waste, making it chemically inert, such as vitrifying it in glass, and putting it some place, preferrably some place where humans cannot accidentally break it up and ingest it, which is the only way that they could harm themselves, and the bottom of the ocean is a pretty good spot for that. Alternatively, just a cheap deep bore hill we drill in the ground.
People do live in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. They have the entire time. Hell – this is something many people don’t know, because they can’t be arsed to look into it themselves, and they get their only information from the professional liars that are Green Peace and the rest of the modern so-called environmental movement: Chernobyl was a multi-reactor complex. One had a horrible accident / failure, but several of the other reactors were operated for many years afterwards.
It’s probably safe to live in most of the exclusion zone of Fukushima right now. Maybe wait a decade for a little more decay time for safety. You will get radiation on many beaches at 10x the rate than you will walking about the Fukushima area.
People fear what they don’t understand, and people fear more when people they trust lie to them. The Republican party is based on fear-mongering. The modern so-called environmental movement, esp groups like Green Peace, are also based on fear-mongering. If you are not pro-nuclear, then you are not an environmentalist.
You’re using that as a defense of cost overruns of 30x compared to similar civilian ships, and to defend the generous uptime measure of 50% for that Navy ship compared to high 90s percent uptime for civilian ships? You have absolutely no background in engineering, do you? What sort of magical thing do you think needs to happen in military ship construction as compared to civilian ship construction that can at all possibly make the cheaper ship 30x more expensive than the larger ship, and with half the uptime?
And as for your final paragraph of libertarian talking points, I’ll keep it brief. It doesn’t even deserve a response. I will note the logical inconsistency of your post – you argue that the Navy ship construction wasn’t obviously incredibly wasteful, but simultaneously you argue that the gov is inherently wasteful. So, gov is always bad and inefficient, unless it’s military, in which case it can do no wrong (exaggeration for humorous effect). You sound like the standard Republican flag-bearer fool.
Yeah, they way this usually works is –
1. Create a perfectly sensible agency.
2. Start deciding that some of the info is “unsafe” for the public to know, or be able to check.
3. Start doing one, or all of the following – cut corners, cut budgets, cut employees, cut standards, shuffle the money to other projects, than wonder where it went, insist, “there hasn’t been problem so far, so we should stop looking for problems so hard, deregulate, over-regulate everyone else, tack on more things for it to do, rob it of things its supposed to do, decide it needs “oversight (not public mind you, but government), and create one, then two, then three, then four, etc. new agencies to watch the regulation agency, and each other.
4. Declare it all a big fisco, and either argue endlessly about how to fix it, or, if you are a pseudo-anarchist (i.e. real life economic/political libertarian), talk up how much better it would be to just toss out all the regulators, including the original agency, and just let the people that spent the last 50 years helping push, and create, the idiot mess in #3, do what ever they want, without anyone at all (other than, somehow, the public), watching them.
Oh, and either 3.5, or 4.5 – make damn sure that the public has no access, even if they where smart enough to look for it, to the information needed to oversight the industry themselves.
The problem isn’t, exactly, either too much, or too little, government – its that the people involved stop doing their jobs, and instead start pandering to the idiots they are supposed to be watching. Most of the broken systems would still work, if they had been either a) left bloody alone, or b) been adjusted in ways that helped the “people” instead of the corporate interests and politicians. Instead, at some point, there are almost always derailed into doing one, or both, with, more often than not, no one having any damn guts to say, “This is a conflict.”
The problem isn’t, Mr. EnlightenmentLiberal, that the government is “always” wasteful. Its that, over time, it invariably becomes so, because rarely, if ever, are step taken, at the start, to prevent this, nor are the public often well enough informed to be diligent in preventing those with every interest “other” than the publics from chipping away at the safeguards, when they are in place. Its like.. a nasty sort of social entropy – any system that doesn’t have a mechanism to truly renew itself, not just replace parts with broken copies (kind of like political cell death and cancer), will invariably be, at some point, replaced by something that **does not function either as it should, or needs to, or was intended to**. It will, instead, leave you with a renewed 20 year old body (the next generation of voters), complaining about the fact that its got a 200 year old heart, a 50 year old liver, and a spastic colon, and a brain (the current government) whose only thought is, “Why are these new cells all so annoying, and what the heck did someone do with my false teeth?”
This is especially the case when, instead of putting sane steps in place, in the first place, you have some twit decide that a guy that would have died at 40, 200 years ago, still deserves to claim “knowledge” about how the constitution effects modern America, or even what the F modern America actually is, who is pushing 90, because either a) they assumed the bastard would be mental by then, and drop out, or b) wouldn’t life that damn long.