I’m not exactly anti-nuclear, but I do think a piece of the puzzle is just trying to do things a little bit smarter. We waste enormous amounts of energy in ways that don’t meaningfully make our lives better, just because there was a time when we really believed cheap energy was infinite, and it’d be just as easy to do things slightly differently and not waste that energy.
I’d like to see more simple green building principals- pay attention to where you put windows in houses to catch cross breezes in the summer. Build out of materials that retain or dissipate heat as is appropriate for your climate. It makes no sense for a house in Tucson to be the same as a house in Boston. By all means, don’t mess with livability. But be smart about it.
Likewise, when building suburbs and other developments, have some kind of plan to make walking possible. Build the school and shopping areas in the center, rather than the outskirts. Make a plan for if one day the city wants to introduce bus or rail service. Just be a little smarter.
Conservation will help, but not alleviate our energy problems. Lowering demand would simply lower the price of energy, and increase conspicuous consumption elsewhere, restoring the high prices, often without reducing the consumption. Conservation is important, but not a solution unless you convince a lot of people to resume a 19th century lifestyle. Good luck with that.
All of the problems we have in getting away from fossil fuels have to do with economy. Coal, oil, and gas are inexpensive, to produce, and to produce power from. The alternatives are more complex in many ways. Solar energy is available only half the time. Wind energy is sporadically available. Hydroelectric is safe, and reliable, but is often destructive to the environment (not to the extent that bothers me, but try to start up a hydroelectric plant of any variety and see what happens). Geothermal is readily available almost everywhere, but not particularly efficient everywhere. And electricity is unlikely to replace oil and gas for certain applications, such as long haul trucking and flying. Many of the ineffeciencies of electrical power in general come from transmission losses.
But if the cost of fossil fuels rises sufficiently, all of the alternatives become more practical. One suggestion I have (not too seriously), is that we should subsidize the cost of oil so that consumption will increase rapidly, causing the eventual depletion of the resource. This will at least force us use other technologies. I think a better approach would be to subsidize the alternative energy systems so they can compete with the cheaper fossil fuels. This is done to some degree already (almost every energy source is subsidized in one way or another). But it is not to the degree necessary to divert the usage of fossil fuels. And that is necessary for the level of industrial development required to have these alternate energy sources to even approach the economy of fossil fuels.
Coming soon: I will pitch the solution, so as to amuse my fellow dopers, and allow them to throw figurative sticks and stones.
Current US power consumption per capita/per year is 13.6 megawatts.
How many wind turbines do you think can be built to meet needs?
According to this (with a little math taking 20.2% of total for nuclear) wind power would need to generate 869,000,000 MWh just to replace nuclear (we are not talking about added capacity or replacing any other source of energy).
According to this it looks like a 2.5 MW wind turbine will produce around 4,000,000 kWh (or 4,000 MWh) per year. Granted different sites will produce different amounts of power but this is to ball park what you are looking at.
So, you will need to manufacture 217,250 wind turbines to meet just the need from nuclear power plants (nevermind coal or anything else).
Assume they can currently build ten per day in the US (say the GE 2.5MW wind turbine…I have no idea what current capacity is but I’d be surprised if it was that high). That is 21,725 days or 60 years to build them. At 100 per day, which would be substantial production capacity, you are at 6 years. Six years seems reasonable but we have not counted all the other stuff such as the poles they go on, power lines that need to go to that many turbines and re-jiggering our whole power grid to accommodate this sort of power.
Then add in installation of that many turbines which is going to take awhile.
The point of all this is not to say it couldn’t be done (it could) but that it is a substantial effort and not really a whole lot better than building nuclear plants would be.
WAM I am flattered that my post interested you so much that you quote me twice!
Please see this DOE report (that’s the summary) for details of why they concluded that getting to 20% wind by 2030 was a reasonable goal. Yes it means increasing from the 3 GW/yr of new installation that was in 2007 (when the report was released) to 16GW/yr by 2018 and continuing that until 2030. Not so hard to imagine since in 2009 we had already increased to 10GW of new wind.
My browser crashed and I hit “quote” then pasted what was still on my clipboard and did not notice. :smack:
Again, I never said these things can’t be done. We churned out Liberty Ships at an astonishing rate in WWII. Given enough motivation and effort and time to gear up our industry can be formidable.
My point is when you say nuclear plants take too long to build it doesn’t measure up so well when you consider how many wind turbines would need to be built and installed to do the same thing. They might still be faster in the end for the same capacity but the differences are not so large as to suggest nukes have no chance.
Also remember with 217,000 wind turbines you will have failures. Even if their mean time between failure is 20 years you’ll be replacing 30 per day (on average) just to maintain capacity.
Sounds expensive too. Remember, it is not just the money you spend to power your home but also the cost of literally everything you buy. Those added costs would be shunted into pretty much everything.
It’s also an additional hit to efficiency, since if you are going to use “alternative energy” to power the economy instead of just as a supplement, then the solar panels and wind turbines will have to provide their own energy for manufacture, installation and maintenance. It takes quite some time for such low energy systems to pay back the energy debt involved in making and installing them.
DT, how muh time is “quite some time” to you. For wind power it seems to be 6.8 months. Now your turn, how long until a nuclear power plant pays back its construction energy costs? Is it a smaller percent of its designed lifetime? Or more?
Can we, by 2018 install 60% more wind turbines per year in America than we did 2009? If so then by 2030 we’d be at 20% wind power, according to the DOE. Sooner if we hit that mark faster.
Given that US wind installation increased more than three-fold from 2007 to 2009 I think that the answer is that doing such would be not very difficult.
Even adding in a few GW worth each year that would age out beginning in 2025 or so, it would not be hard.
OTOH convincing a company to invest in building new foundries and developing new training programs for nuclear engineers and convincing a generation to enroll in them and pumping out several new nuclear plants per year … seems a bit harder to accomplish.
Again, I am for building some nuclear. I am for a diverse tool box and using what works best where it works best. But thinking that nuclear is the calvary coming over the hill to save us from global warming is unrealistic.
It is trivially easy to point out that the solar resource is enormous, as are the wind, wave or tidal resources. It’s just as trivially easy to point out that we could have a string of bases on the Moon by now: we were capable of getting people and stuff there forty years ago. The question is how much effort is required to actually capture enough of those low-density energy sources to make a difference?
My cite from post 47 listed some of the resource requirements for building up to 3TW of installed global wind energy (30% of 2007 electricity demand) by 2020. In case anyone missed it:
• 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
I don’t know if those figures are correct, but they seem to be line with DSeid’s DOE report for 300GW installed in the USA by 2030. Wind turbine capacity factors are improving, with 36% now being normal and 40-50% predicted, which cuts down the land use and resources requirements. Nevertheless, the DOE report contains a number of features that make me raise my eyebrows:
“Fiberglass: Additional fiberglass furnaces would be needed to build
more wind turbines. Primary raw materials for fiberglass (sand) are
in ample supply, but availability and costs are expected to fluctuate
for resins, adhesives, and cores made from the petroleum-based
chemicals that are used to impregnate the fiberglass (Laxson, Hand,
and Blair 2006).”
No shit. If it takes 30 times the world product of glass fibre to build 3TW, it still takes 3 times the world production to build 300 GW. Pointing out the abundance of sand at this stage seems a bit desperate.
“Core: End-grain balsa wood is an alternative core material that can
replace the low-density polymer foam used in blade construction.
Availability of this wood might be an issue based on the growth rate
of balsa trees relative to the projected high demand.”
They are proposing to fill those 100m diameter turbine blades on those 100,000-odd turbines with wood. How very green. Those turbines have a life of only 20 years. Not sure if those wood-filled blades will need replacing with more wood every 20 years.
“Carbon fiber: Current global production of commercial-grade
carbon fiber is approximately 50 million pounds (lb) per year. The
use of carbon fiber in turbine blades in 2030 alone would nearly
double this demand. To achieve such drastic industry scale-up,
changes to carbon fiber production technologies, production
facilities, packaging, and emissions-control procedures will be
required.”
One year alone out of a 20 year project would require almost the entire global production. No further comment required.
“Bottlenecks were identified for various components, but obtaining gearbox components was particularly problematic. Currently, only a few manufacturers in the world deliver gearboxes for large wind turbines. Additional investments will be required to support the development of a gearbox industry specifically for large wind applications. Investments will also be needed to expand the manufacture of large bearings and large castings.”
'20% by 2030" in the USA may be possible, same as bases on the Moon, but it certainly isn’t trivial and assumes all sorts of massive scale-ups in the production of various commodities. I’d like to see a comparison with the resources required to install 300 GW of fossil plant or nuclear power, and/or with the resources consumed by other large engineering projects in history. As far as phasing out fossil and not using nuclear is concerned, I want to be persuaded that the renewables route is even doable. No moral arguments or green philosophy or excited pointings-out of the size of the resources. Convince me that this isn’t an overwhelmingly hard undertaking.
How much energy does the U.S. waste? | Grist This article indicates a huge waste before it even gets to our homes where we waste 40 percent more.
We are wasteful slobs who should change our ways.
You will have to train an army of people to maintain wind generators. We have shown you will need a couple hundred-thousand of the things. I was looking up MTBF stats earlier and they (a company that builds the things [PDF]) claimed they were striving for 750 hours and current cycles are 175 hours.
Do the math.
2.5MW wind turbines are not small or simple or cheap things.
Nor do they generally run at max power non-stop so you need to overbuild.
I am becoming amazed at your utter recalcitrance on this issue. No matter what has been said, no matter what evidence has been provided, you are stuck like a car in the mud spinning its tires. You have been provided cite upon cite upon cite. Your sources have been thoroughly debunked.
Want to match cite for cite and let the Board choose? I’d be happy to play that game IF you promise to abide by the consensus. Given the consensus is already against you though not sure why you’d take that bet (and this is a liberal forum so not like you are in enemy territory).
Yet you persist with this crap anyway.
I am going with a phobic (literally and all that word means) reaction to nuclear power or you have huge investments in other forms of energy.
That or an utter inability to parse and absorb new information as you get it.
matt without question wind would require more total material inputs per MW. Googling even a little gives us this which puts the concrete and steel inputs alone to be ten times higher per MW for wind than for nuclear.
Still no one thinks that a concrete or steel will be the bottlenecks and it is the issue of potential bottlenecks that are what matters most.
For the potential bottlenecks of wind suppliers can build up capacity in synch with increased demand. A maker of fiberglass has had several years of increased demand and of running the lines full tilt and can increase capacity incrementally. His/her gamble is fairly small. Likewise with gearboxes, etc. Such has occurred to no small degree already. When demand fairly consistently ramps up over time manufacturing capacity is not a major concern. Manufacturing capacity right now has been ample to allow for 10GW of new wind installation in America in 2009, up from 3GW in 2007 (the year of that report). If there is no critical shortage of raw materials, do you really think that suppliers won’t be able to ramp up another 60% capacity by 2018?
How does this compare to the potential bottlenecks for nuclear plant construction? The bottle necks are the foundries and the trained manpower and the circumstance is not consistent and predictable increases in demand, nor an ability to relatively gradually increase manufacturing capacity to meet that increase in demand. The nuclear power advocacy organization, the World Nuclear Organization puts it like this:
Oh there are some new forges that have been planned and some under construction and they highlight them (and bemoan that none are in America). But the nature of the beast makes investing in new capacity to produce supply a much riskier enterprise than is building more capacity to make blades to meet a current shortfall.
(Of course despite this circumstance, and the fact that there are not even enough currently under construction to replace what is supposed to age out - see that NYT article that lev linked to - the WNA believes that by 2030 we will increase the world’s nuclear capacity by 2030 by *at least *235 GW and perhaps by as much as 983 GW, from a current total of 367 GW to low end of 602 GW and a high end of 1350 GW.)
I think it is clear the US is nearing crunch time to make an investment in the future for power generation. Its nuclear plants are aging and are coming up for re-certification. They might get another 20 years.
That means we need to replace roughly 20% of our power generation in the next 20 years (give or take). I am not even counting coal power plants here (not sure if they can run indefinitely as long as they are maintained).
So, what are our choices?
Hydro: Already maxed in the US. Perhaps there are more places they could be built in theory but not seeing it happening in any significant way.
Geothermal: Very site specific to access the energy and unless you can get people to turn Yellowstone into a power plant not seeing it happening in any significant way.
Solar: Even with recent advances costs are still exorbitant and we need to invent power storage technologies. I have seen some technologies for power storage proposed but nothing that will store power sufficient to run a nation. Costs of that are a whole other question.
Wind: We have dealt with that already in this thread. You’d need to provide for a massive construction effort to meet just current needs that nuclear provides. The cost per kilowatt is far more expensive than nuclear (as cited in another thread we both participated in and I can’t be arsed to look up again). Land use. Noise. Re-configure the whole power grid. It has lots of problems.
Coal: We have lots of it. Perhaps another 100 years or maybe even more (I have seen 250 cited). Thing is coal is a huge CO2 emitter. The biggest CO2 emitter. There is no tech to capture that cost effectively on an industrial sized plant (per Una Persson’s assessment in other threads).
Natural Gas: Not a bad choice short term. It emits CO2 but not horribly compared to coal. However, operation costs are hugely (80% iirc) dependent on the price of the fuel. I guessed natural gas prices (which are rather low right now) would rise in 10 years. Una Persson, who knows a whole helluva lot more about this than I do, said their assessment was 50 years at the outside. Sounds a long time but considering the time needed to bring on the capacity we are talking about it is not that far out. And this assumes natural gas prices remain low(ish) in price in the near term.
Oil: For power grid generation I doubt it counts for much these days and cannot imagine building new plants to do it.
Biofuels: So far not in the mix in a serious way. I have seen some cool stuff, nothing I have seen suggests they could make a significant impact in power grid generation.
Nuclear: On a cost per kilowatt hour it is favorable with coal (cited in another thread I am too lazy to dig up). It is expensive to build and cheap to run (fuel costs are minor). Fuel is abundant. Aside from waste that needs be buried it is pretty clean (no CO2 worth mentioning).
As I have said before other green methods should be pursued. They have their place (in the right places) and can mitigate the need to build other power plants. They will not meet our needs though.
We are left with coal or nuclear. We have showed how coal is far, far more dangerous to you and the planet.
Coincidentally I was just looking at that very report, but I skipped the introduction and was in the middle of my own comparison calcs!
I also recall a sixty-year design life for a nuke plant compared with 20-25 for a wind turbine. At the end of a turbine’s life, how much needs replacing? Is it just the blades, or perhaps a whole new nacelle on top of the tower? Can you bolt a new tower onto the old concrete anchor?
At the moment they may not be, with 15-20% wind penetrations in a limited number of countries. I’m not so sure that will remain the case. See my post 47, and that’s to supply 30% of the 2007 electricity demand. 100% of the world concrete production, twice the entire world steel production, almost half the world’s coal extraction (to smelt all that steel and roast all that cement, presumably.) I don’t think concrete, steel and coal will be bottlenecks so much as they will become very expensive very fast.
I absolutely don’t know. You have to build plant, you have to melt that glass before you extrude it into fibres, and the polymer requirements for all those GRP blades are just plain scary.
As you say, money talks and nobody is too sure whether nuclear is dead now, or inevitable. I think China will be the decider, and China will make up its own mind depending on its experiences with nuclear, wind and solar. If China decides to go ahead with its proposed nuclear development even in the wake of Fukushima, expect such foundries to develop fast. There’s also some modular designs of reactor such as the Westinghouse IRIS or Babcocks and Wilcox that don’t need a huge pressure vessel. They can be made by conventional boiler manufacturers or industrial pressure vessel makers. http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/22867/?a=f https://smr.inl.gov/Content.aspx?externalID=E9DB092D-00ED-46B3-B396-5861817DAD20
But anyway, that’s not the point of this thread. How to do away with nuclear AND coal is the OP! I haven’t tracked down any resource use estimates for solar yet. I don’t think photovoltaics are the way forward but concentrated-solar-plus-heat-engine shows promise. The various experimental plants around the world should have some resources data.
Incidentally, the second page of this article claims that wind installation in the USA crashed in 2010 and is likely to remain crashed now that the federal subsidies are drying up:
Oh, and on the 3rd page: “Also, most people hoped that experience and economies of scale would reduce wind energy costs. But according to data from an August 2010 study by the DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, the prices for new wind-generated electrical energy from 2009 projects is almost 80% higher than projects developed five years earlier.”
I wonder (genuinely!) if that is a consequence of shortages of GRP pushing the prices of the turbines up.
I saw another that put the MTBF at 10 years. The cite above would seem to indicate a longer cycle but maybe when you have several things with an MTBF of X-years the combination results in an MTBF of something less. I also cited earlier the turbines currently need loving every 175 hours (give or take) but it was a cite from a producer trying to claim their turbines were better in that regard so take with a grain of salt. I do not think that is outright failure but rather need some care to operate efficiently.