:rolleyes: Then we start more programs. Seriously, do you think there’s something magic about the profession? The problem is the will to do so, not any intrinsic difficulty.
Wishful thinking. In the best conditions it takes nearly 10 years to get a plant built. But after Japan where do you think it can be erected.? The NIMBYs prevented plants from being built before. It will not be easier to get approval now.
Did you even read what you quoted? I said that I didn’t think more would be built.
Not until things get so bad that the NIMBYs won’t matter because it’ll be a state of emergency and they’ll be held off with soldiers, if necessary.
That seems a little pessimistic. First atomic pile, Dec. 1942. First nuclear power plant, Jun. 1956. I think we have a lot more resources now. IMHO, the profit motive is a big factor here. I don’t think the problem is the amount of energy, its the desire for cheap, profitable energy. I think that’s the problem with developing the alternatives as well.
I’m a pro-nuke guy whose confidence that we can do nuke safely has taken a bit of dent recently, but I don’t want to hijack here with the advantages/disadvantages of nuclear vs renewables. For the purposes of this thread, nuclear is off the table.
You’re absolutely correct that the USA could easily replace its nuclear electricity with wind and/or solar or with efficiency improvements. Ground-loop heat-exchanger heating-cooling in every home would do it with power to spare, for example.
On the other hand, something you have consistently refused to acknowledge in the “still support nuke power” thread is that the USA is not the world, and AGW is a global problem. Also, this thread isn’t about getting rid of nuclear, its about getting rid of nuclear and fossil. Globally, the energy needs of the world ARE increasing. Since you want a cite, try the IPCC, figure 2.8: Emissions Scenarios — IPCC
300 million Americans cutting their average per capita energy use of 250 kWh per day by 25% (and that would be doing really well) won’t mean squat if 2.5 billion Chinese and Indians increase their per-capita energy use by just 10 kWh per day (and chances are, over the next few decades it will be a LOT more than that). Carbon-neutral power for the developing world is the big issue, not whether the USA can or should shut down its nuke plants.
There’s a shortage of figures in this thread. Without the figures, it’s all waffle. Although it’s a bit UK-focussed, this site is a fantastic resource for anyone who actually wants to see how things add up rather than espousing a general philisophy. http://www.withouthotair.com/
The skinny: energy demand of the world is currently around 16-18 terawatts, and that’s everything: generated power, vehicles and transport, steel and concrete production, agriculture etc. 16 milion - 18 milion megawatts. A big power plant, nuke or fossil, runs 1000 - 2000 megawatts, so we’re talking the equivalent of of 16000 -18000, one-thousand-megawatt power plants, globally. That’s the current power demand. It’ll be 19 - 23 terawatts by 2030, depending how well we do with efficiency and conservation.
Wind energy is certainly feasible and useful in the right niche, but it’s very low density. It has a (very optimistic) peak power density of 9W / sq. m. Averaged out over the windy and not windy times, with a (very optimistic again) load factor of 33%, this is 3W /sq. m. So To replace a single 1000 MW plant with wind, we need 1500 2-megawatt turbines occupying 330 sq km, a 12 x 12 mile square. Doesn’t sound all that much, but to power the world would require an area equivalent to 57% of the USA covered with wind farms, using these optimistic assumptions. Just to power the USA’s requirement of 3.3 terawatts would require 11% of the USA’s land area for wind farms.
The land use of wind power looks a little better if you just consider the footprints of the turbines and allow for using the land between for stuff, e.g. growing crops. Maybe farmers would be happy to fill their fields with turbines and grow stuff in between, for a little more profit. Whether farm land coincides well with good windfarm sites is a question.
The thing about birds is currently blown out of proportion: far more many birds die from vehicle impacts and simply flying into glass windows. Whether this would remain the case with truly huge areas of windfarms, even using “bird friendly” turbines, is another question. I suspect it would be a bird massacre.
Solar power exploited in the desert does a bit better than wind as far as land requirements go - it needs 5 - 10 times less land with conversion efficiencies of 10-20%. So, maybe 1-2% of the USA land area to power the USA, and that area would be desert. Installed costs of solar are still sky-high, but that might change if companies were churning out heliostat mirror arrays the same way they do wind turbines, and if the focus was on heat-engine conversion rather than expensive photovoltaics. Solar is also a way more predictable supply than wind - you know it peaks at midday and you know it goes away at night. In theory, we could power the world with desert solar.
How feasible is harvesting low-density renewables on a massive scale this way? I don’t know. We’d have to compare it to other engineering achievements of the past. For example, according to this Yahoo Answer (and if anyone has a more authoritative cite, please share it) the paved area of the USA 61000 sq, miles, which is about 1.7% of the land area. However, covering land with cheap black goop and rubble, which are both by-products of other industries anyway, is a different matter from covering it with photovoltaics or tracking mirrors. I’d love to see a proper study about what would actually be involved to do such a thing, compared to e.g. the Manhattan project, the Normandy landings, the Liberty ships and other engineering efforts.
DSeid, I really don’t get you. You’re not innumerate. You know the difference between a valid and an invalid argument. Here’s an invalid argument against wind: the USA total power requirement is 3.3 terawatts - 3300 gigwatts. 10% of that is 330 gigawatts. The first half of 2010 saw 16 GW additional wind capacity installed globally with the wind power industry going flat out, so lets say the global wind turbine industry can install 35 GW capacity a year. At that rate it would take 9 years of the entire global production capacity to get just the USA up to a mere 10% of its requirements as installed wind capacity, which becomes 27-45 years since you only actually GET 20-30% of your installed capacity as electricity from wind. Therefore wind power is waste of time because there isn’t enough manufacturing capacity.
It’s a bullshit argument, not just because 3.3 terawatts is the US TOTAL power requirement, not the generated power requirement, but because the global production capacity of wind turbines can and will increase if it needs to. The same goes for nuclear.
Don’t talk about wind having enough capacity to power the entire world, glossing over the monumental increase in wind turbine manufacture required to actually exploit that, while bringing up a lack of production capacity in the nuclear industry as an argument against nuclear. It’s just not valid.
Unless there is a one world government we can not change the whole globe. But America is the largest user of energy. The mistakes we have made are clear to other nations. China is big into solar, wind and other newer forms of energy production. Several European countries are getting large portions of their energy from renewable
. When the next big idea comes for energy production, it wont be here. We still cling to old technologies and fight against the new. We 're arguing about coal, while everybody sees it is dirty and could be cleaner. But who will clean it up? It wont be the energy companies. They fight any attempts to force them to be cleaner.
Oil companies love fracking. It is exempt from clean energy rules. That should be a lesson n why we will not be on top in the future. We still cling to the past to make immediate profits.
Are you kidding me? The ChiComs don’t give a crap about pollution-they are using coal and oil at massive rates. Yes they are into solar, wind, and all that but so are we. Its not that we are archaic and clinging to old technologies while the rest of the world is moving on much of France uses massive amounts of nuclear power.
What are you basing that on Fox Gnus? China realizes it is heading for a disaster . Their cities are filthy and the air nearly unbreathable. They are working hard on developing technologies to end the coal dependence. They have to. They see the future.
We do not. The people who see the filthy future in America are called names . That is what we do.
Alternative-Energy-News.info domain is for sale | Buy with Epik.com This is what China will do.
And we are not? Are we not developing solar, wind, and geothermal power?
Roll eyes yourself.
No, nothing magical about nuclear engineering, and no magical way to have twice as many training programs up and running overnight or to convince enough people to enroll in them (guess what? those who have what is needed to do well in nuclear engineering have plenty of other possible lines of work to choose between that are not so prone to political whims) or to get them through any faster or to get them seasoned any quicker. It would be not so much different than if what we needed to do was to both replace all of the country’s physicians and grow their numbers three or fourfold all in a decade or two. Yes, doable. But a plan to use nuclear to displace sizable amounts of fossil fuel based power plant generation would have to include that, not just our insulating the “investor” from any possible fiscal risk. And include a plan to create a few more of those foundries.
matt, sorry but your exercise in post #25 is just silly. Powering United States, let alone the world, on wind power, or solar, from the US alone, is not a meaningful metric. And, as I have pointed out in the other thread, that 11% of the countries land area that would theoretically power the entire United States by wind, that presumably would be in the corridor of best wind resource, would be able to be used for agricultural or industrial uses while it was also being used for wind power generation, as could solar.
Studies. You want studies. Well the DOE has done 'em and sees no technical problem with getting wind up to 20% by 2030. You can get to their pdf with all study details from that link.
NREL also did a study looking to see if “the power system operated by the WestConnect group of utilities in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Wyoming” could handle “up to 35% energy penetration of wind, photovoltaics (PVs), and concentrating solar power (CSP)” and found that it is “that it is operationally feasible for WestConnect to accommodate 30% wind and 5% solar energy penetration”
But of course, as you rightly point out, the issue is more than the United States. You want “a proper study” of providing major power from solar? How about using the Sahara to produce electricity to import to Europe? Back when Libiya was considered stable, twenty companies “including Siemens, Deutsche Bank, and the energy companies RWE and E.on” were exploring exploiting that resource since “if just 0.3% of the light falling on the Sahara and Middle Eastern deserts was captured, it could provide all of Europe’s energy needs.” The plan would call for
and they figured that a “€400bn investment would be enough to cover 15% of Europe’s electricity requirements”.
Meanwhile Spain is achieving 21% of its electricity from wind, and 2.6% from solar. The remainder is nuclear, hydro, and coal, in that order. They plan on increasing renewables share by 67% within the decade.
As to your comment in post #26 - There are many players in the wind turbine manufacturing business. Capacity is now ample and is fairly easily ramped up. The industry has banked on a prediction of consistent demand for years to come. (In truth there is an excess of capacity right now, and the largest manufacturer, Vestas, has had to “close five production plants across Scandinavia and cut 3,000 jobs” as “the surge in demand for wind power it had hoped for in Europe had not materialised”.) Installing and operating a wind power system does not require a great deal of specialized and prolonged education. There, OTOH, is one company that makes weldless high pressure reactor vessels. Ramping up capacity is not easy and will not occur unless future consistent demand is virtually guaranteed, which is a guantee no one can give. Engineers for installing and operating the nuclear plants require a bit more training than do those installing and operating a wind farm.
It is a realistic goal for America to get to 20% wind and perhaps 5% solar in the US within a decade. Add in some geothermal and biomass increase and 30% is doable. That compares to 3.6% nonhydro renewable generation (not capacity) today. Use that 27% more of the total to displace the dirtiest coal generation and you have retired the dirtiest 60% of coal generating plants. That leaves us with 18% of our electricity generation coming from coal, 20% from nuclear and 23% from natural gas. Feel free to increase natural gas to replace more coal plants. That’s neither fossil fuel free or nuclear free but it is much less fossil fuel and what is used of fossil fuel much less CO2/MW fossil fuel. And it is no more nuclear (hoping to maintain our current stock on net).
Will we get there by then? No, of course not. Natural gas is still too cheap and carbon is not yet monetized. More new capacity is going to be natural gas until its net price (including monetized carbon) starts to rise so that renewables are cheaper.
From your cite:
These are scenarios.
Between now and 2100 our emissions could range from a sevenfold increase to roughly the same levels as in 1990.
Regarding population projections, between now and 2100 the population ranges from 15 billion at its highest, to a low of about the same population as we have now, after a slight increase mid-century, then a decrease.
See the IPCC report. It’s a guessing game whether China and India will grow, both in terms of population and emissions.
UK focus doesn’t do much good when AGW is a global problem, something you **consistently **refuse to acknowledge?
I’ve always acknowledged we’re facing a global problem, which is one of the reasons I oppose nuclear energy as any sort of answer for global energy demands.
According to this:
We have plenty of renewable energy available to us.
We didn’t just throw up roads quickly, we also filled those roads with big steel cars and gas stations on every corner and we built whole cities around our roads and highways. Don’t forget 100 years ago there were zero airline passengers and today we fly over a billion passengers/year.
We can do amazing things, when there’s money in it. Heck, look at all the world’s military toys: List of countries by level of military equipment.
I don’t see how manufacturing enough wind turbines and solar panels is going to be a civilization-stopper.
The irony here is that I think it works the other way. Anti-nuke people say “well nuclear has some potential issues, therefore, let’s not do it” - not “we’ve evaluated the environmental/cost/safety impact of nuclear vs other sources and nuclear doesn’t add up” but a very simple knee jerk "radiation is scary, let’s not do it.
I would suggest that if you get that notion at all from pro-nuke people, it’s because we realize that alt energy is not a practical solution to the global warming crisis. Most nuclear proponents are fans of wind and solar and unicorn power and what have you - I certainly am. But I’m realistic enough about the problem to know that even if we went all balls out for alt energy, we might be able to get it up to 20% of our power generation in a decade or two.
Alt energy advocates seem to think that’s fine and dandy and why worry about anything else, but nuclear advocates realize that the other 80% has to come from somewhere. And if people fight off nuclear, then that 80% is going to come from coal. So when fight nuclear and instead promote alt energy, what you’re really doing is fighting for coal. If the alt energy is cost effective, it’ll happen anyway.
And for some reason coal gets a complete pass on its downsides. No one even considers how much it contributes to global warming or how many people die from lung cancer from breathing in coal particulates or how it’s creating all sorts of pollution. No, people are super concerned about waste being stored in concrete blocks inside steel barrels in the middle of a mountain in the middle of nowhere, but somehow thousands of plants putting dirty, horrible pollution INTO THE VERY AIR WE BREATHE 24/7 is no concern at all.
It’s not a stopgap method, we’ve got hundreds of years worth of uranium at current consumption rates with current reserves, and we can build different kinds of reactors to run on different types of fuel, or even derive their fuel from the waste of other types of reactors. Even if we quintipled our nuclear energy output, we wouldn’t have to worry about running out of fuel for hundreds of years.
The plants take a decade to get online because of hysterical ninnies like you. I like how you do your best to delay and raise the cost of construction of nuclear plants, and then say "see! nuclear isn’t practical, it takes forever and is expensive!
As far as the waste poisoning everything it touches - I think I can somehow live with a mountain where no one lives becoming filled with waste. I tend to prefer it to the alternative which poisons everything it touches which JUST HAPPENS TO BE THE FUCKING ATMOSPHERE.
It does’t produce massive amounts of power because coal is producing it all. So ok, you replace the currently existing nuke power with alt energy (extremely optimistic and would take decades probably) - but you’re conceding that we’re just going to be burning coal indefinitely. Is that what you want?
I don’t think we’re encouraging poor, developing nations to develop nuclear power - but it’d be good for the world if a place like china used them. Do you have any idea how much dirty coal shit they put into the world’s atmosphere?
Basically to think that all it will take is more money thrown at the problem, as if that will magically give us a solution. Hope, IOW…hope that there is a huge breakthrough that will enable wind power to generate larger amounts of energy per turbine while the costs come crashing down by an order of magnitude per turbine, hope that the energy density of solar goes way up while again costs per panel plummets, and hope all this happens in some sort of time frame that let’s us build the things on a large enough scale and quickly enough to make some sort of difference concerning Global Warming…and, as a poster mentioned up thread, that this all happens before our aging nuclear power plants start going off line due to expired shelf life and the fact that we don’t build the things anymore, and that instead of replacing them with coal or natural gas plants we replace them with the new an improved magic pony technology. And hope that our energy needs stay relatively static, while the rest of the world also stays relatively static, at least until the magic ponies are in the starting gate and ready to run wild and free.
It’s a lot of ‘hope’. The irony is that a lot of the folks who are in ‘hope’ mode are also anti-tech guys who, if you talked to them on just about any other subject and you said ‘well, technological innovation will see us through with new breakthroughs coming down the pipeline’ would snort in derision at such ‘hope’. I think that there are indeed technologies and innovations that will incrementally make solar and wind better, more cost effective technologies in the future…but they aren’t here now, and when they come it will take time to ramp up production and deployment. Of course, the same COULD be said about nuclear…there are plenty of technologies that would make it even safer and cheaper (and quicker) to build, but that gets ignored (and really is meaningless, at least in the US, since no way could you get a new design approved, funded, built and in production in the current environment).
Like Der Trihs I don’t think that nuclear is going to happen in the US. We won’t be building new, innovative nuclear power plants. Won’t be exploring or researching new nuclear technologies. The current plants will get creakier and creakier, and eventually they will be decommissioned. The anti-nuke crowd with cheer and pat each other on the back. They will talk about how wind and solar are the coming thing. They will marvel at the large wind farms, and new solar power plants. And they will ignore the fact that all of those wind turbines and solar panels make up a small fraction of our overall energy needs, and to replace the lost capacity of those nuclear power plants (20% of our electrical power generation) we’ll build…coal and natural gas plants. And while our own CO2 will probably remain relatively flat (and high), countries like China and India are going to shoot through the roof and continue to increase (China is the number one producer of CO2, and they derive 80% of their electrical energy from coal).
-XT
coughnavy nuclear power programcough
My exhusband was a nuke, he and I worked in power plant refits for Henze-Movats and Furmanite. Why not like, think of recruiting the retiring nukes, ETs and such from the navy. Heck mrAru is actually considering seeing if he can pick up a contract in Japan right now as he was in RadCon, served on subs and did the navy nuke program. If the money is better than what he is making now, I have no problem with his heading to Japan for a while, it isn’t like I didn’t spend 20 years with him popping in and out of the country for prolonged periods 
And that NIMBY view is also part of why it takes 20 years to get a damned plant approved and built, or any modernization of designs done. The nuke no-nothings are idiots who associate nuke power with bombs. The knee jerk china syndrome reaction to power plant accidents is just a small part of the problem. There is such an evil view of it, nuclear engineering is just not going to be a popular study until people can realize that nuke power is a tool, not always a weapon or huge earthshattering danger.
I have taken a lot of steps in the last 2 years making changes to reduce the energy requirements of the household, and changed to a diesel vehicle that can burn biodiesel AND gets 43 MPG consistantly, without needing to firstly have a huge bank of batteries that puts out toxic chemicals to build, and it doesn’t need to dispose of old batteries and replace them every 5 years or so…
But I am only 1 household. I still see the jackass across the road with 2 freaking huge assed hummer penis substitutes, that never leave pavement. I see half the people that work at my husbands place in the city driving honking huge SUVs that live in the city and could easily use small efficient commuter cars. I see huge McMansions for 2 people. It isn’t always the developing countries that are going to give us problems, it is the 1st world countries as well. I would love to see serious penalties for morons who buy SUVs and monster trucks that have no possible use for them. They need to strap their damned asses in a freaking commuter car that is energy efficient, not show off how much money they have in an SUV.
Talk to the greedy investors then. I would love a SF type world government, with world peace and no need for hundreds of standing armies, just a unified peaceful police force dedicated to fighting crime and not people. I can live with anybody regardless of color or creed, why can’t they 
China and India are building nuke plants. Do I think they *should *build nuke plants?
Well, yes in a way.
Building nuke plants will keep the technology alive and serve as a lesson for the rest of the world. US companies are big into the overseas nuke power business, so it’s not like the US is losing its nuke tech edge, whatever that means. If it works great, then great. If it doesn’t, well it wasn’t in my backyard, thank goodness. 
I don’t think nuclear power is something that should be in the hands of private business, anywhere.
China gets about 1% of its power from nuke. They were hoping for 10% by 2050, but I believe since Fukushima, they’ve backed off that estimate. They’re moving forward, but now it’s going to be slower and more cautiously.
Every wedge in the cleaner energy pie helps, and if China and India want nuke, they can have it. I do not think everyone else should have it.
[QUOTE=levdrakon]
China gets about 1% of its power from nuke. They were hoping for 10% by 2050, but I believe since Fukushima, they’ve backed off that estimate. They’re moving forward, but now it’s going to be slower and more cautiously.
[/QUOTE]
They are hoping for a 10 fold increase by 2020, not 2050…they should more than double the number of working reactors they will have by then, and the new reactors are all higher capacity, more modern designs. I haven’t heard that they are backing off of any of that, though I don’t know how realistic their assertion of a 10 fold increase is in that time frame, or how much of a boost the new reactor designs will actually be on a per-plant basis.
Sadly though, no matter what they do, they will still have a high percentage of their total electrical production being done by coal plants. 80% today, and they are building new coal plants like mad…as they are building everything else they can to try and keep up with projected future demand. Even if nuclear goes up to 10%, and with their hydro at 15%, and with them building wind and solar like crazy and getting, oh to be wildly optimistic say another 10%, that leaves approx. 60-65% of their energy needs being met by coal…and that’s if they somehow manage to get wind/solar up over 10 fold of what they have today (it’s less than 1% combined).
-XT
after having seen what is happen in Tokyo do we really have much choice!
Yep, you can pick coal or nuclear.
If nuclear had 1/100th the kills of the 23000 coal pollution related deaths in the US per year (and 500,000 in China) you’d be shitting your pants. But hey, radiation is weird and scary, and burning coal just seems down to Earth by comparison, even if it kills way more people. This table shows the worldwide average deaths per terrawatt hour generated as 161 people killed per terrawatt hour, and nuclear has 0.04 killed per terrawatt hour. This doesn’t include global warming related deaths, of which coal is a major contributor.
We could have a chernobyl every other month and nuclear still wouldn’t kill as many people as coal does. And nuclear only hurts anyone at all in rare, catastrophic situations - coal hurts people 24/7 as part of its normal mode of operation.
The only reason anyone is anti-nuke is because they don’t truly consider that it’s not going to be replaced with unicorn power but largely by coal, and no one seems to give even the slightest shit about how coal massively kills and pollutes and wrecks the environment and causes global warming, but a few barrels of nuclear waste in triple-layered bins buried in some cement in the middle of a mountain in nowhere is the scariest shit ever. Coal is so insanely worse than nuclear and yet no one EVER FUCKING TALKS ABOUT THE NEGATIVES OF IT FOR SOME FUCKING MYSTERIOUS REASON THAT ENRAGES ME.
In my post I gave a cite from the DOE that stated that increasing wind to 20% in ten years is very doable and that adding in increases in other renewables (such as solar, geothermal, and biomass) getting to a 30% renewable electricity generation share was not at all unrealistic. That could in ten years displace the dirtiest 60% of our coal electricity generation.
Do you think it is at all realistic to increase nuclear’s share from its current 20% to 47% in the same ten years in order to displace the same number of coal plants? How about even to a 30% share? That would mean building an additional 52 nuclear plants in the United States (if each plant was as big as the average current one and none retire) in the next ten years.
If you think that, you must be sniffing unicorn farts.
In reality what will happen will be more modest than either. Our current old nuclear plants will all be given extensions to keep producing beyond there planned 40 year retirement age. (I hope we really are sure these older designs stay safe as they get past their designed retirement age.). Maybe one nuclear plant will be built, maybe not. Wind will continue to increase - but not to the DOE’s proposed 20% share mark - maybe to 10 or even 15% - and solar will increase a bit less as well. If we get up to 20% combined for all non-hydro renewable (from our current 3.6% - with hydro renewables are 10.5%) I’ll be happy. The biggest growth will be in new natural gas plants, which are much less offending than are the cleanest most efficient coal plants, and which complement renewables very well. A more modest number of coal plants will be taken off-line.
That will kick the ball down the field a little. Then we will have to decide what to do when the old nuclear plants run out of their 20 year extensions and when natural gas prices start to rise back up with increased demand.