Even under optimistic predictions, you’re saying you’re only going to handle 30% of the problem.
This is a false dilemma. It doesn’t have to be nuclear or renewables, it could, and should, be both. Nuclear advocates aren’t saying that we should ignore renewables and only do nuclear. Let’s double our nuclear output and double our renewable output. Let’s do absolutely everything we can to get away from fossil fuels.
I don’t know the engineering challenges to building that many nuke plants so fast, but I do think if we charged coal for the real cost it has to society (carbon and pollution taxes), nuclear would suddenly become far more economically appealing, spurring the growth of the industry. And if fucking environmentalists can actually live up to their professed concern with global warming, and get the fuck out of the way, nuclear plants could be built a whole lot faster.
I wasn’t literally talking about powering the world using USA land! I was just using it as an illustration of the sorts of land areas required, for the predominantly USA readership of this board.
Thanks for the DOE study. It’s exactly the sort of thing I want to know, although it’s pretty much a bullet-pointed presentation piece rather than an analysis. The primary findings were interesting - “cost to integrate wind modest, raw materials available, transmission a challenge”. I was surprised transmission was an issue at 20% penetration, and I would have loved to see some detail on the capacity to actually turn raw materials into wind turbines. (Incidentally, in post #25 I calculated 11% of USA land required to meet a power demand of 3.3 terawatts, or 1% per 300 gigawatts. Your cited DOE study calculated 15 million acres to supply “about 300 gigawatts” which is 0.66% of the USA land area - the same sort of ballpark although the study doesn’t show its calculation.)
That is not a study. That is a newspaper article, and a pretty equivocal one at that. “But although none of the companies is keen to go into detail yet about their involvement, they stress that the project is a chance for them to drive forward the fight against climate change and in doing so to position themselves at the top of the green technology industry.” That sounds like a vague agglomeration of good intentions to me. I did Google Desertec though and it appears a serious project, but as to whether it has any real backing isn’t clear yet. We can hope.
Spain is in the rather happy position of having a fair baseload capacity with nuclear, and also a big chunk of hydro. Hydro can be switched on or off really rapidly allowing it to balance fluctuations in the wind production. If they have pumped storage, even better. I’d love to see a breakdown of how it all works and what it all costs, but so far no luck. Your businessweek cite states that solar and wind are heavily subsidised in Spain but didn’t give any details.
Ample how? How many gigawatts installed capacity per year, and what can that be ramped up to? I’m not criticising or knocking the industry: I really want to know if we can build truly enormous windfarms worldwide without hitting a wall. Likewise solar.
Also irrelevant. Saying “nuclear can’t double in 10 years, therefore let’s not do it” doesn’t make sense. Whatever nuclear we can build, we build. It’s not going to stop production on solar panels or wind turbines, it’s not like we can only do one. So we build nuclear plants as fast as it’s possible to do, and we build renewables too.
Nothing you said argues against nuclear power. Regardless of how long it takes, we should start now and do as much as we can.
I do know, however, that the long average build times of recent nuclear plants are more due to litigation issues than engineering ones. We haven’t forgotten how to build stuff, we just have to deal with hysterical ninnies ruining shit. If we got serious about addressing our future energy needs and global warming, we’d streamline the building process and offer some degree of legislative protection. Factor this in with carbon/pollution taxes that show the true cost of fossil fuel power generation to our society, and suddenly everyone will be rushing to build nuke plants.
**"Building up 3TW of wind power up to 2020 will cover
30% of the world electricity consumption in 2007 and
will demand a 27% annual cumulative growth throughout
The period.
The 1.5 million times 2 MW wind generators required
Will imply:
• 2 times the present world steel production of 2006
• Almost half of the world extraction of coal
• 30 times the world production of glass fiber
• The world concrete production
• Almost half of the copper world production"**
That’s a LOT of resources, but OTOH 3 TW is a LOT of power. I’d like to see a comparison with 3TW worth of, say, Westinghouse AP1000s and 3TW worth of concentrated solar.
Can any of you pro-nuclear and pro-fossil fuel people explain to us liberals what 3850000 exajoules is in terms of every power source humans have ever deployed?
Here’s a clue: it comes out to 3850000/57
Essentially, solar power can provide so many times more than what your nuclear and coal power plants that this entire thread is a non-starter. The only reason why we aren’t supplanting fossil fuel and nuclear power plants with solar is the fossil fuel and nuclear industries are fighting against it tooth and nail with propaganda like what is being posted here.
The other reason why solar energy has so many opponents is that if everyone HAD solar on their roofs, there would be little profit for the big centralized energy corporations except maybe at night.
We are building nuke plants as fast as possible. That’s why it’s so easy to see the impossibility of nuke ever safely and economically producing more that its current token, trophy power.
Right, because harnessing the entire power of the sunlight that hits the entire earth is a trivial matter and it’s only the man that keeps it from happening. Oh, sure, The Man, the big international corporations, are the ones making the windmills and the solar panels, but they want to limit their own profit and make sure they kill solar panels and that no one buys them.
Tell me, are the death squads that kill anyone who invents a car that gets 200 mpg the same ones that make solar panel advocates dissapear in the middle of the night?
Tell me though - why is it that the solar panel manufactures, who could make trillions of dollars if it were that easy, refuse to make those trillions because they don’t want to harm the profits of the utility companies? Do you think that’s how big business works? “I could print my own money, but it would be at the cost of the profits of another company, so I won’t do it, because while we are so unethical that we purposely suppress a utopian solar power revolution, we’re not so evil that we’d steal business from a competitor”
Seriously - how can you even think what you think? It’s not even remotely logically consistent even if you assume the worst intentions from big business. It just doesn’t make sense from any angle.
People say that ford knows how to make a 250 mpg engine, but they keep it a secret because making it would hurt big oil. But this assume that all big corporations are on the same side, that they’re all some sort of evil conspiring entity. That ford would voluntarily turn down trillions of dollars and becoming the biggest car manufacturer in the world because they’d be worried that exxon mobil wouldn’t stay profitable. It makes no sense - even if you assume both corporations are pure evil, they’re still competing with each other for that money. They’re not going to suppress something that makes themselves money to benefit the other guy.
Similarly, the solar panels and wind mills are made by big evil corporations. Le Jackelope would have us believe that these big corporations purposely shoot themselves in the foot and don’t sell all of the magical solar panels they could because they’re worried about the profits of the utility companies. Why, exactly, do they have this concern for a completely different business? Is the super evil corporation that would screw the entire world for a buck just too nice to cut into a competitor’s market share for profits?
Why would all the big companies that make solar and wind power - the big evil corporations - suppress their own profit they make by selling these panels and turbines - to help the profitability of the utility companies?
When you have to engage in this sort of nonsensical conspiratorial thinking, you should consider introspection, because there’s about a 99% chance you’ve made a fundamental error somewhere.
No, it’s a straw man, and an audacious one at that.
I’ve never heard this 250 mpg conspiracy theory, and I have a feeling if you find a cite about it for me, it’s going to be from a tinfoil conspiracy website or something.
You’re making up a ridiculous conspiracy theory and then falsely claiming “see, that’s what anti-nukers think!”
That’s really the best pro-nuke tactic you’ve got?
We ship our technology abroad so it will be more profitable. If we came up with new wind turbines, the info would be shipped to China or Indonesia where they would be manufactured and sold back to us.
China and India are cranking out college graduates and engineers. We are jacking tuition rates up to preclude our people from going to college.
The trends are clear. we will become a second class country to make more money for the people on top.
Patriotism is food for those on the bottom.The people on top do not swallow it.
My analogy is irrelevant. My points stand without it. Even if you refute my analogy (which you didn’t), you did not refute the point I was making when I tried to explain it with the analogy.
Ok, no analogies:
The big corporations that make solar panels and wind turbines would not purposely shoot themselves in the foot and fail to sell as many of those things as they could, and generate as much profit as they could, because they were concerned about the potential impacts on the profits of an entirely seperate bunch of corporations if they did.
I’m not addressing all anti-nukers with this statement, just in particular Le Jackelope’s ramblings about how we’d be awash in all the clean energy we wanted if only the big evil corporations weren’t suppressing it.
If some company came out with 90% efficient solar panels tomorrow that could be made for a quarter per square foot, then they’d sell a trillion dollars worth and you’d find them everywhere. They wouldn’t suppress this technology and not sell their market-dominating products because they’d be concerned about the profitability of utility companies and power plants.
Which means that the reason we aren’t running the world several times over on solar panels has to do with economics and efficiencies and all that practical real world stuff, and not an evil conspiracy by a corporation against their own self interests.
Bull. It has been estimated that we waste 40 percent of our energy. Conservation is a great way to cut energy dependence.
Lots of people live off the grid. the only think they are starved from is heating and cooling bills. We can not all afford to go that far, but every step helps.
QIN you are such a good believer. You are young and who knows what your future thought changes will be? But if you stay right where you are, I would suggest the next name change for you should be XTWILLBEME.
I actually do not disagree with you much here. I’d love to see an adequate monetization of carbon and let the market compete.
It is however necessary to point out the naivete of thinking that nuculear power is the answer; it will take a significant build out just to keep up with what ages out. If we want to make a significant impact in decreasing CO2 the next decade “new nuke” is unicorns.
And despite what “you know”, the reason for long build times and excess costs has less to do with litigation than with the other risks of a major construction project in which everything has to be just so. See lev link - the issue for Areva was not litigation, it was cracked concrete and misplaced steel beams. The result is twice as much to build it as expected and still not done. No protestors and no court cases. Just construction issues.
Price the carbon adequately and you will get some new nuclear but I would bet that more new generation capacity would be from renewables, and that even replacing aging plants would be iffy.
Just dropping in to say that for a family (and probably just a couple of people), it’s unlikely you can beat the efficiency of a dishwasher by hand washing (decent article).