My fantasy is to monetize the externals, i.e. price the carbon, and let the market decide. What we do now, is a poor substitute, but is better than nothing. Again, I am for doing nuclear at a replacement rate, albeit not sanguine we will achieve it, and accept the loan guarantees as the price of getting there. But the reason it is not being built is because the economics, which include the risk of the investment, are not attractive without the government making it so. Just like wind and other renewables.
Radiation leakage accidents don’t worry me. I actually think modern nuke plants are as safe as they can ever be. Throw even more money into making them somehow safe enough to survive a large meteor impact and you’re just throwing your money away. You can’t make them safe enough. They are as safe as they’ll ever get and that isn’t enough for the public.
Dictators won’t have to bother with fast-breeder reactors; we are going to give them fast-breeder reactors and all the associated atomic expertise that goes with them, as part of our clean nuclear future.
I haven’t heard it described that way.
Then why did you ask?
Science is always about managing uncertainties. We have some very good handles on how much risk at what levels of CO2. No offense, but saying that people already die, and that we don’t know how many more would die if I set of an atomic bomb, so I shouldn’t worry about it, which is the same basic idea as what you are saying, is very very silly.
How is nuclear an answer? Good phrasing. It is not the answer, it is an answer. Along with renewables and natural gas and efficiency and so on. The most cost-effective solution will be different in different regions depending on local resources and conditions. In some places in it will be a mix of wind and solar tied together and maybe some geothermal thrown in. Some locales will have less of those resources. Maybe for those places it will be co-firing coal with biomass. Or solid oxide fuel cells buried in oil shale. Or nuclear. Price the carbon appropriately and let the market decide. With carbon priced appropriately I am fairly sure that nuclear will be part of the mix in some areas. And some not.
[QUOTE=DSeid]
How is nuclear an answer? Good phrasing. It is not the answer, it is an answer. Along with renewables and natural gas and efficiency and so on.
[/QUOTE]
Exactly. Or, at least it SHOULD
All this proves is that the public is extraordinarily bad at risk assessment–we already knew that, because state lotteries make consistent money.
Expertise to run a reactor and expertise to design a bomb and refine fuel for same are two very different things. Not to mention the fact that breeder reactors don’t produce all that much more Pu per unit fuel consumed, unless the fuel is specifically (and noticeably) optimized for breeding. Either way you have to refine the stuff that comes out to produce bomb-grade material.
Well, now you know. Part of the point of fast-breeders is that they can consume even relatively stable actinide isotopes (like Pu-238 and Pu-240) as fuel. Depending on the fuel configuration, you can breed more or burn up Pu and thermally fissionable U. If you want to breed fuel, you use U-238 blankets for the fuel core which breed Pu over time–if you use steel reflector blankets instead, the reactor burns the created plutonium in its core.
Interestingly, I found out another reason why fast reactors aren’t being developed commercially in the US very much. Turns out the DoE charges utilities a flat rate for radioactive waste disposal regardless of the residual radioactivity, so they would rather the cheaper capital up-front cost of thermal neutron reactors even if said reactors are orders of magnitude less efficient. Your tax dollars at work. :mad:
Also: the biggest reason to push for fast-breeder reactors? Instead of expensively processing the fuel from thermal reactors and storing 97% of the mass of the original fuel rods in some deep storage site like Yucca Mountain, you can crudely filter and re-cast those wastes and run them as the cores for fast breeder reactors, which not only produces power but can reduce the waste to as little as 3% of the original fuel mass, and much of that residue is significantly shorter of half-life to boot–still on the order of centuries (as opposed to millennia), but an improvement is an improvement.
[QUOTE=DSeid]
How is nuclear an answer? Good phrasing. It is not the answer, it is an answer. Along with renewables and natural gas and efficiency and so on.
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Exactly. Or, at least it SHOULD be part of the answer. Unfortunately, it’s a fading part of the answer, at least in the US. Maybe that will change in the future, but the last decade or so hasn’t seen a hell of a lot of new nuclear plants built…even of the older designs. And I don’t see that changing. In fact, I see the opposite…what’s happening in Japan is going to be the rallying cry of the anti-nuker, not just in the US but world wide. And we’ll try and force wind and solar to fill the gap, replacing one clean, non-polluting energy technology with another clean, non-polluting technology, but one that despite predictions by the DOE I don’t see filling the gap in nuclear before the nuclear plants in the US at least start going beyond their shelf life.
Let’s say that, somehow we CAN get 20% of our energy from wind by 2030. How many of the current nuclear power plants in the US will still be running at full output by then? 75%? 50% Less? They will be in many cases 50 or more years old, since I don’t think many of the current plants were built after the 80’s or 90’s. So…assuming we get 20% out of wind such that it’s truly able to fill the gap (which means we will have to build more than 20% to account for the variability), what then? We’ll be right back to where we are today, when wind accounts for 1 or 2% and nuclear accounts for 19 or 20%…that means we’ll STILL need something to produce the rest of our energy. How many of the current crop of hydro plants will still be operating by then? They will be even older…some of them closing in on a century by that point, since a lot of dams were built by the WPA during the depression. I doubt we’ll be building any new ones, since the environmental impacts of a large dam project are intolerable in the US these days. What else? Solar? What’s the prediction we can get solar up to 20% at the same time we are trying to jam wind up to 20%??
Taking nuclear out of the equation, as seems likely to me, really limits our options for the majority of our power generation down to coal and perhaps natural gas (while it lasts). I don’t see how we can realistically meet even our current needs with any other currently available technology. True, maybe fusion will FINALLY happen (perhaps we’ll mine H3 from the moon, and have flying cars and such too :)), or maybe there will be other unforseen breakthroughs that happen. But the way it looks to me today, if we abandon nuclear or leave it to die on the vine, we’re pretty much stuck with coal and some other stuff to fill in the gaps and hopefully, through massive effort and cost, replace our aging/dying nuclear power systems by 2030. Maybe. Perhaps.
-XT
I wanted to hear Xtisme explain what he thinks is going to happen that is so bad it’s worth going all out on whatever it would cost to go 80% nuclear.
Huh? Saying an unknown number of people will die from GW is like saying an unknown number of people will die from cancer caused by nuclear power radiation. Why is that reason for panic in the former case but an unprovable and in any case acceptable loss in the latter case?
I know the answer involves a mix, you know the answer involves a mix, and most people know the answer involves a mix. Xtisme and Senorbeef allow 20% renewable and otherwise insist the remaining 80% must be nuclear. Yet, they won’t explain how to get there, but if we don’t get there, by 2020 or '30 or something, it will be Armageddon. Somehow. It involves global warming.
You’ve already pointed out the problems with getting any new nuke built in the US. Sure nuclear will continue to contribute to the world’s energy portfolio. It’s not going to produce 80% of the US’s energy nor is it going to produce 80% of the world’s energy. It’s not going to do that anytime this century and I think the only thing sillier than trying to predict our energy needs and sources next century is building nuke plants now that have to have 80-100 year operational lifespans to make economic sense.
I don’t know about SeniorBeef, but I never said anything remotely resembling the asserting that nuclear will be 80%. That’s ridiculous, and a total fabrication of my positions in this debate.
-XT
Okay, thanks for the information.
One thing I don’t get about fast-breeders is as you say, they’re more expensive but then they’re more efficient. But, efficiency isn’t really a concern in nuclear power because fuel is cheap. If there were a shortage of uranium as people predict, it will be temporary until more mining comes online. Even if uranium prices shoot up, they won’t shoot up far enough to make much difference in operational costs.
France, Japan and Russia have had ample time to get their fast-breeders up and running and consume their existing nuclear waste, and yet they haven’t.
I’d like to see one actually consuming not-so-spent waste before I committed the US to the technology. It would be nice to build a few for the purpose of consuming our existing and rapidly growing “spent” nuclear fuel piles. It should be run by the military, as it evidently can’t work as a private or civilian endeavor.
In post 298 you pretty clearly stated nuke “COULD” scale up but wouldn’t because people like me poisoned the well. I wish I had the kind of super powers you think people like me have. Nuclear energy probably wouldn’t even be on my top 10 to-do list.
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No. It isn’t like that. One has a great deal of risk of being a very large number and one has high degree of probability of being a tiny number. Yes, we can have the crackpots in each case who say that the former is actually very small or that the latter is large, and you can get the media giving soapboxes to them, or those who say in each case that they are the same “because they don’t really know”, but they are not the same. The risks from nuclear, especially any newer plants to be built, are non-zero but compared to the risks associated with climate change, very small. And I think you know that.
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No one has advocated for 80% nuclear. The point that has been made is only that if nuclear is not allowed to continue to part of the mix then anything that renewables can’t do has to be fossil fuels and in practicality long term that means coal. And realistically renewables cannot do it all. Again, assuming we get up to 40% renewables that leaves 60% that is not renewables. Again, just keeping nuclear’s current 20% share, just replacing what is due to go off line over the next several decades, would require a much more substantial building program than we are likely to be able to achieve. Some believe that it could be scaled up to do more than that if the well was not politically poisoned, to take on a larger potion of that non-renewable 60%, I don’t, but even those people are not saying don’t attempt to achieve what we can with other sources.
[QUOTE=levdrakon]
In post 298 you pretty clearly stated nuke “COULD” scale up but wouldn’t because people like me poisoned the well. I wish I had the kind of super powers you think people like me have. Nuclear energy probably wouldn’t even be on my top 10 to-do list.
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You should really go back and re-read what I actually wrote, and then perhaps ask some questions since it’s clear you didn’t get it. Here, let me help you:
I wonder what ‘could’ scale up to ‘provide a significant percentage of our electrical energy’. A power source that doesn’t produce CO2 or other nasty pollutants or emissions. It doesn’t say anywhere in there that I think Nuclear could provide 80% of our electrical power. You…made…that…up.
See, I know nuclear power could scale up to provide a ‘significant percentage’ of our electrical power because IT ALREADY DOES. No super powers required, neglected and partially abandoned it STILL provides 20% of our total electrical output. We could ‘easily’ (using gonzomax’s definition of the term) double that. I mean, you are talking about upping wind an order of magnitude to what it does today in the US, then doubling that…why couldn’t we simply double nuclear? The answer, obviously, is that we COULD…but that we won’t. Even if we just replaced the old stuff and kept it at 20%, nuclear would STILL be providing a ‘significant percentage’ of our electrical output.
But just wanted to clear up the strawman 80% that you simply pulled out of the air and tried to pin on me, probably because you thought it was totally over the top, and possibly you figured no one would go back and bother reading what I had actually written. I suspect that SeniorBeef didn’t mention it either, since you didn’t even bother citing a post from him saying that. Par for the course in any discussion with you. Sometimes it’s possible to have a series of meaningful posts with you, then you will leap off into deception and dogmatic mouthings that have little or nothing to do with reality. Ah well…c’est la vie.
-XT
As I sort of touched on, the thing that burns me is that apparently nuclear waste disposal is pretty heavily subsidized in a way that doesn’t care about the specific radioactivity (and hence, storage difficulty and duration) of the waste. I’d expect to see more FBRs being built if there were more realistic pricing to the utilities on permanent waste storage.
I would, too. The last one we tried to prototype commercially was a 1970s design, disastrous from a political standpoint, and killed by Carter.
And you are so amazingly obtuse and clueless.
Unless you’re arguing for ZERO PERCENT usage of fossil fuels, you are not advocating less use of fossil fuels than me. So please relieve yourself of that fantasy.
Read this very slowly, so that you can comprehend.
- Replace fully 25% of our fossil fuels with solar and wind NOW.
- Re-evaluate that imaginary 75% figure you came up with where we’re supposedly dependent upon fossil fuels, because frankly that 75% you came up with is bullshit.
- Work very fast on replacing the other 75% of our energy production with wind and solar.
LOL… love that froth at the mouth style of arguing.
Excuse me, but exactly what does solar and wind power burn? I am advocating the rapid, total replacement of all fossil and nuclear power with solar and wind. Where is the luddism in that?
LOL @ your temper tantrum!!! When you’re losing an argument, use moar cappa!*
I want to replace fossil fuels with wind and solar. Totally. 100%.
Only in your feverish imagination.
I want to replace fossil fuels with wind and solar. Totally. 100%. I will not ever compromise on that. You can deal, or not. Caps away, dude. But you are seriously deluding yourself if you think you are, or ever will be, more anti-fossil fuels than me.
Awwww, don’t blow yourself a gasket now.
Instead, why don’t you try educating yourself on the meaning of luddism. It simply does not mean what you keep saying it does. Either that, or get a reading comprehension aid to study what I’ve written - again, here is what I have written:
We do not need nuclear power or fossil fuels to cover 75% of our energy production.
Deal with it, dude. We can handle all that with wind and solar.
- Dakka, but for caps instead.
We don’t need fossil fuels or nuclear power to supply any of our electricity needs. It can all be fulfilled with wind and solar power.
What you’re doing here is not arguing.
sigh Whatever planet your arguments are coming from, it’s not at all visible from Earth by any equipment made by today’s technology.
Frankly I cannot believe you got away with such a huge personal attack tirade and the moderators let it slide. Er, wait, yes I can…
[QUOTE=Le Jacquelope]
Frankly I cannot believe you got away with such a huge personal attack tirade and the moderators let it slide. Er, wait, yes I can…
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The irony of your last two posts juxtaposed with the above statement is pretty much off the charts. Especially when you consider the quote from SB you posted which is speaking in general, non-specific terms. Perhaps you have a different definition of ‘some people’ or ‘they’ that includes specific, personal attack?
-XT
You were engaged in the exact same behavior and did not see fit to report the posts. You both need to stop it immediately.
By their nature, sophisticated motors and photovoltaics, as currently implemented, require precision electrical apparatus in the generation turbines. Equally, we need to consider the resource investment in power transmission (since solar/wind siting is more constrained than typical power plants–if less constrained than hydroelectric/geothermal) and in load adjustment (since solar/wind are inherently more variable over time than conventional power) with batteries, kinetic storage, etc.
My understanding is that even the most modern thin-film/DSSC-type solar cells use a fair amount of rare earth metals. Organics are promising long-term, but they use fullerines (nontrivial to manufacture) and right now the numbers on their conversion efficiency are down in the single digits.
Heck, I’d be interested to see a comparison of various energy sources as a function of kilowatts per pound of steel, copper, neodymium, silicon, cadmium, ruthenium, etc. I don’t know that anyone’s broken it out in those terms anywhere I’ve seen it.
I linked to the post so people could read it themselves, if they want to. I doubt anyone really cares at this point. In the post, you quoted me asking where is the other 80% going to come from and your answer to that was nuclear could scale up. Now you’re backpedaling and saying “to a significant percentage.”
That’s fine; I don’t care. This is a tangent we don’t need. You didn’t answer the question though. In my opinion nuclear could not scale up to meet 80% of our energy. France I think gets 80% or so of their electricity from nuke, but they sure as heck don’t get 80% of their energy from nuke. They’re still dependent on fossil fuel; their cars run on gas. They export cheap baseload nuke power and import expensive fossil-fuel based peak load power from other countries. France is the world model for what nuke can do, and it’s clearly not eliminated their emissions or freed them from fossil fuel dependence.
The US is huge in comparison. You’re talking about a herculean effort on the part of society to equal the ancient Egyptians building pyramids or the Chinese building the Great Wall. You aren’t going to get that sort of commitment and effort from society and that’s not NIMBYism or politics, as you say.
If we could muster that sort of effort and commitment from society, I’d say let’s just bite the bullet and go for space-based solar power. There’s nothing stopping us but money and commitment. It’d cost trillions, but it’s not like the US gov can’t come up with a couple trillion here and there for things it wants.
As it is now, wind has already poisoned your nuclear well not by politics but by demonstrating it can provide clean power now, and it can come in on-time and on-budget. Who in his right mind would risk billions on nuclear?
Wind can’t do it all either of course, and we’re going to run into manufacturing shortages and rising wind power prices. That’s probably inevitable. The same would happen even faster building nuclear power stations. Building a nuclear power plant is a colossal undertaking. Even if you could muster up the labor to build some, who would operate them? It takes years of education, training and experience to become a nuclear operator but the industry’s been a complete non-mover for 30 years. You’d have to wipe away all our regulations regarding training and education and experience and import a bunch of low-paid PhD’d Indians to run them and then you’d be draining India’s nuclear-qualified work force.
And just to make sure people understand what that means, it means that ALL renewables will account for 14% of electrical generation by 2035. It’s already at 11%, and that includes hydro, geothermal, biomass, wind, solar, etc.
Wind itself is expected to roughly triple in total generating capacity, from 55.6 gigawatts to 163.4 gigawatts. That’s an annual growth rate of 3.2%.
The EIA also has a number of scenarios you can run on their interactive spreadsheet. The best case I could find for wind was the ‘low renewables cost’ scenario, in which the cost of wind power declines by 40% by 2035. In that case, they predict total wind generation of 259.49 GW by 2035, or a growth rate of 5.1% per year. The EIA’s absolute best case scenario would get you to about 10% wind, if energy consumption was frozen at today’s levels. Since it won’t be, wind will be somewhat less than that in its percentage of contribution. Under the normal scenario, wind will have a hard time surpassing 5% of total energy generation.
None of that is close to the exponential growth rates you’d need to get to 20% wind power by 2030.