The problem with sources like wind and solar is that you essentially need to duplicate their capacity because they are unreliable. If, for example, 30% of your demand is met by solar and wind, what are you going to do on a cloudy windless day? Consumers aren’t going to cut their demand by that much, so you have little choice but to implement rolling blackouts. Not a practical choice.
Tidal and Geothermal would be nice, but there just aren’t enough viable locations to meet demand.
Biomass sounds nice, but there is no way that is going to ever be practical. If energy is our most pressing demand, then there is no doubt water is our second. The land and water demands of replacing our entire source of energy with biofuels is staggering, and not something we have access too. Plus, any sort of biofuels we develop should go first to solving the problem of vehicle emissions.
Una “easy” is a relative thing. I’m referencing the oldest and dirtiest plants, which, as per my source are no small number. Relative to a complete tear-down and replacement or more pertinent to the op, building in nuclear capacity to accomplish the same goals … easy.
I’d love a link to your past discussions of biomass for power. Honestly I’ve missed them and I’ve posted the issue myself before. I have no need to make you repeat them, but I’d love the benefit of your expertise.
As to the shortage of qualified nuclear engineers and other workers:
FutureGen has at least been funded and sited. Will it happen? I think so as I think that the next administration will actually start to get serious about carbon reduction. I’ve established why I do not think that nuclear will accomplish much even if it came without any unsolved problems, and I while I believe that renewables will play bigger and bigger roles, and that distributed generation will pick up some too (down to even more residential generation, depending on location, including wind, solar, and even PlugPower’s combined hydrogen fueling station/heating/back-up power plant being sold by Honda), coal is something we have lots of. Using it better cannot be absent from our future plans.
As to your next post and the cost-efficiency of clean coal: Science 2/9/07 (but behind wall)
And again, the dirtiest plants are overdue for refits or retirement. You know better than I, but my source, The Presidential Advisory Committee one, implies that reasonable upgrades can have substantial efficiency gains while increasing capacity significantly.
As to what I mean by “that I know of” is that I know less about TECO’s plan’s and I have only briefly read of other utilities plans. My sense is that the government funders dropped biomass for power support in favor of funding biomass for ethanol. Again. I’ll defer to your greater knowledge about the Iowa switchgrass project … what I know is that biofuel feedstock for powerplant cofiring can leave more carbon in the ground (in its roots) each cycle than it releases. That Iowa has huge tracts not well suited for row crops that are coming back off the set-aside doles. And that the pilot project allegedly worked out well. If there is more information than that I haven’t found it. From your tone I suspect that there is. As to other biomass possibilities - no, I don’t see it as a magic bullet either, but we have huge volumes of “black liquor” available in the paper industry Now that paper is old, but back then the industry was responsible for “12% of total manufacturing energy use in the U.S.” and the potential of improved gasification techniques was substantial:
This is your field. What has developed since then?
As to why I am hopeful for Greenfuels and their ilk … their only problem in their last demo project was that it grew too fast. To me issues of how to harvest faster are not too likely to be unsolvable. Meanwhile much research is being funded on designing algae for better product production. When capturing carbon becomes incentivized then methods like this become more attractive - they may not make a lot of money at first but they cost less than burying the carbon. And as the kinks get worked out, they may actually produce product that is profitable too.
Finally, you are an expert. but as our newest poster has provided cites for, we are not exactly busting at the seams in our new energy demands. Much can be picked up if we can utilize means of shifting some power production to current underutilized off-peak times and shave it off some peak times.
treis solutions include pooling the resources (wind is unreliable in one location, but fairly reliable over a wider area that can pool via transmission lines, for example) and better storage devices as referenced in my last post. But again no single source is going to be the answer. Wind will work well some places but not be a great resource elsewhere. Solar will be a practical solution sometimes, tidal and geothermal others. Biomass co-firing will work in some locales but others will not have enough access to feedstock. If some of the load is taken off of a power plant by a variety of distributed generation methods, some that work better one day than another and visversa, then the power plant can produce efficiently without being overtaxed. Will peakers ever be needed? Sure. We are unlikely to eliminate their need entirely. But we can dramatically reduce their use.
Well, again I ask…if there IS enough viable wind power and if it IS cheaper, then why isn’t it going into wide scale use in Europe at least? And I don’t mean ramping up to 10 or 20% of total energy needs…I mean something over 50% of total energy output. This would seem to be a meeting of converging needs…the Euro’s NEED to cut their CO2 output and they NEED energy. Why aren’t they going to a massive adoption of wind if it’s so viable?
Well, that article is a bit misleading don’t you think? They are comparing current manufacturing (when the demand, at least in the US, is, well low…since we aren’t building any new nuclear plants) and projecting that to a time when they might be in high demand. Sounds like a market problem to me…if there is a huge demand for new reactors I’m not thinking companies are going to be letting grass grow under their feet in meeting that demand. There is, after all, big money to be made…no?
Even assuming you are correct here (I don’t think so but for the sake of argument)…so what? Do you know of anything that can scale up to the level required that is better? Even a combination of wind/solar/geothermal/hydroelectric isn’t going to scale up to replace coal fired plants in either the US OR Europe. If it could it would be headed that way NOW…especially in Europe. So…either we stay with coal (and either live with CO2 emissions or figure out some way to limit them…technology that ALSO isn’t ready for prime time any time in the near future, at least not on the scale we are talking about) or we need to look realistically at technologies that can scale up to meet the majority of our energy needs without CO2 emissions. And the ONLY technology that can do that is nuclear…at least today. Maybe in a few decades there will be something else that can scale up to meet the real world needs…but not today. Do you want to wait a few decades to take care of this problem? CAN we wait a few decades?
I agree. But realistically how much do you think you would get out of even a 50% percent upgrade in line efficiency? Do you realistically think this would enable wind/solar/geothermal/hydroelectric to replace the majority of coal fired plants?
My own bottom line isn’t anti-wind/solar/geothermal/hydroelectric…or even coal. To me those are all going to continue to play an important part in the mix of technologies we will use for generating cleaner power. However, if we REALLY want to have technologies that produce the quantities of power we need for our technological civilization nuclear is the only REAL technology alternative that scales up AND is not years of development away from being ready to use. It’s ALREADY ready to use…it’s tried and tested and it works NOW. It can scale up easily (if expensively) to meet our energy needs by replacing coal fired plants on the grid.
As for subsidizing them…well, understand, I’m no big fan of the government subsidizing ANYTHING, so you will get no argument from me. However…how important is all this CO2 stuff? If it’s REALLY important than you may want to re-think that argument. If it isn’t…well, then coal fired plants work fine and they are already in massive use. We could simply wait while we develop some new silver bullets for burning coal cleanly, for new solar technologies to be perfected, for new wind technologies to be perfected…or for some other magical new technology to be developed, tested, scaled up and mass produced. If a few decades from now is good enough for this whole global warming thingy then I agree…let’s hold off on the nukes and develop these new technologies to the point they can be deployed.
If this whole GW thingy IS serious though…well, best get those hippies out of the way and start building nuke plants by whatever means you can as quickly (while staying safe) as you can. Because it’s the ONLY alternative that can produce energy on the scales we are talking about…today anyway. And probably in this decade as well.
Since it amounts to a few large rooms full (if we are talking about the high grade stuff from the nuclear plants), we certainly could. What’s your point exactly? You figure that, after decades of the anti-nuke crew using fear tactics that the public being afraid to have this stuff in their backyard is a good reason not to build the things?
Myself I am in wait and see mode. I judge how serious folks (especially in the AGW/earth is at the crisis point crowd) are about all this stuff by how willing they are to look at realistic solutions to the problem…and to me, the only realistic solution is a combination of technologies to replace coal fired plants with a heavy reliance on nuclear fission plants, at least in the short and medium term. Long term who knows…maybe fusion or nano-technology that takes the carbon out of the air and converts it into ponies or something. But if the problem is NOW…well, nuclear is the only serious option.
I don’t know that this is any sort of problem. First, this aging of the industry is not just a nuclear thing, it’s a whole industry thing. Something I run into a lot, when I go to a plant and hear the frequent refrain of “he retired…he retired…nope, no one can figure out how this works.” But operator training is something which is done in a year or two, certainly in much less time than it takes to build a plant. In fact, proper training of the operators doesn’t really start happening until the plant controls are established, since every plant is unique, and has its own custom controls.
In short, I do doubt that there would be a shortage of operators for any nuclear plants.
FutureGen is viewed in the industry as being worse than IGCC - a demo project which will burn through hundreds of millions of tax dollars and in the end produce nothing good. Again, if we can’t get IGCC, which is current tech, working on any real scale, how long is FutureGen off in the future? And with so much established generation, building plants to replace what we have would be astonishing. At our current demand growth rate, there will be an enormous electrical gap which will need filling. That’s my main point I guess.
What are these reasonable upgrades that give substantial efficiency gains? For example, that cite says:
How is this done, actually, without essentially re-building large parts of the plant? That’s my issue - there are things you can do, but they are not simple nor cheap. I wish folks would do them - I’ve seen some abominable power plants, with incredibly poor efficiency, that it pains me to see. Leaky air heaters, leaky ESP ductwork, boilers out of tune, people running their units in poor efficiency mode to reduce NOx emissions (instead of adding SNCR or SCR), etc.
Repowering is not a small upgrade, that’s in effect adding a new power plant onto the same site. And it’s only possible in a limited number of installations. They say “100 gigawatts” in the article; I simply do not believe that. I need to see how they came up with that.
I also wonder at this which they say:
That’s what they consider “simple”? Sure, I like the concept of feedwater heating via the exhaust, and in fact several people are looking at solar feedwater heating-assist, which I think could be a real good way to improve efficiency by a very small amount (with no GHG cost to speak of). But repowering is not that easy.
But it also has problems of scale, collection, delivery, processing, plus the fact that most coal power plants cannot use more than 1-3% biomass (blended in to pass through the pulverizers) without a lot of capital upgrades. We have trouble finding just 25MW worth of biomass when we do our studies, sometimes scouring a whole State. There’s a world of difference between “how much biomass is available in the State” and “how much can be gathered up, put on trucks, and delivered regularly to a plant.” A project I just finished in Wisconsin was that way - on paper, people say there’s that much biomass. And when our guys got on the phones and started calling around, we got maybe 20MW of biomass delivery possible. Plus, as I’ve mentioned, the economics of biomass change dramatically as soon as you call someone about it. You can almost see the dollar signs in their eyes, and all that “waste sewage sludge” that a city was going to give you for free suddenly becomes worth $0.25 per MBtu, then throw on $1.50 per MBtu handling cost, and then you’re more expensive than the cost of coal. In one case, we were working with an Indian reservation which said it would give a plant, for free, about 5MW worth of biomass to burn at a local coal plant, for free, because it would save them landfill costs of about $2 per ton. So when tried to get a contract, they had this big shit-eating grin in the meeting when they said “did we say free? Oh, um, yeah, but there’s a special fee of $10 per ton we’re going to need to put on it for, um, schools, yeah.” Project canceled. A similar price jump happened with a government project, and one with a large furniture manufacturer. In both cases, the entity with the biomass would have saved money, and in both cases the entity with the biomass pulled a bait-and-switch when the chips were down.
There is going to be a serious competition with ethanol production crops that is going to greatly limit this, IMO.
Black liquor is used - it’s burned for energy at the paper mills. There isn’t any market out there for black liquor to be sent elsewhere. Existing paper mills could burn it more efficiently, and I hope they do. All of the boilers I’ve inspected at paper mills are very inefficient (in part, because they tend to be small), so there’s definite room for improvement there. But the companies really would have trouble bearing the cost at the current cost of fuel and electricity.
But I’m not focused on peak, I’m focused on total GWh per year. Because ultimately that’s what we’re talking about.
Ideally, I would mandate that coal plants find some way to burn 5% biomass as a start*, and that technologies like solar feedwater heaters, air heater improvements, boiler tuning and neural networks (a hugely underutilized field for improving efficiency and reducing GHG emissions) be implemented short-term. I also think that coal drying technologies could yield a huge improvement. Low-sulfur Wyoming coal is great in many areas, except for moisture. When you burn Wyoming coal, between 7 to 8% - or more - of your energy is latent heat loss, and most of that is from the water in the coal. Coal pre-drying, using waste heat, could across the board improve the efficiency of hundreds of power plants. All of these things are technically doable, but there is not the will to do them.
But I really think the greatest benefit is in demand-side reductions - conservation. And I think the best way to start on that is simply a carbon tax, which would increase electric costs and reduce efficiency, with the profits going towards R&D.
5% is typically, in US coal plants, the break-point where the plant can no longer send biomass through the pulverizers, and then must have new burners installed. A huge difference in capital cost.
http://archive.greenpeace.org/comms/nukes/chernob/rep02.html Heres a couple hundred incidents of proven safe technology.
XT The point of waste is there is no place for it. There are 32 plants operating on the Great Lakes. They are keeping their waste in cooling ponds. The lifetime claim is they can keep them there for 100 years. If you accept that good for you. I do not. Waste only is dangerous for a million years or so. It is accumulating.
The people who run nuke plants are the same people running coal plants. The Clinton admin sued them to put scrubbers on their stacks to cut pollution. They went to court to stop it. They lost until the Bushies came in and stopped all the suits.
The point is they can make them cleaner and they know it. They refused to because of profits. When we talk of the health of the citizens profits should not trump. Profit corporations will cut workers and cut quality at the cost of safety. They have been doing it for nearly 50 years.
Some of them are. Denmark in particular is massively expanding wind energy production- they increased the national share by more than 6% in just four or five years. That’s a huge gain in such a short time. Granted, Denmark is a small country and 6% of their energy consumption is nothing compared to the gains the US must make, but they’ve got fewer resources to work with as well.
I also noticed in the links at the bottom of my cite that there’s a hydrogen-energy plant in Denmark attached to a wind farm- when they get a windy day, they strip off some of the power, electrolyze water, capture the hydrogen, and use that as stored power. That’s a good way to make the best of wind’s erratic nature if it can be done efficiently. I realize it’s a big if, but I’m still intrigued.
We’re including nuclear weapons and high pressure steam accidents as points against nuclear power? Why don’t we count the number of fatalities associated with coal power? Here - I’ll start: Aberfan, Wales, 1966, 166 fatalities, 116 of them children, as a primary school is crushed beneath a mountain of coal slag.
People willing to point out the accidents involved with nuclear energy aren’t so keen to acknowledge that coal generation is hardly safe, in itself.
Sorry for the doublepost, but I also just ran across this approach to non-turbine wind power generation. It’s clever, really- uses wind to oscillate a band rather than turn a turbine. Tacoma Narrows, anyone?
Looks like the process of “suing” started well before Clinton.
BUT…as far as the AEP lawsuit goes, that did start in the Clinton Administration. However, it’s important to note that under Bush the EPA continued to pursue it, until they won that recent $5B settlement.
I’m sorry, but that is pretty lame. Something like 5000 coal miners dies yearly world wide (IIRC)…and it’s hard to judge how many folk die from the other effects of coal yearly. Compared to that nuclear is like mothers milk.
Oh yeah…and there is the whole global warming thingy to toss in as well.
Horseshit. There is no place for it because the anti-nuke crowd (those who made that nice cite of yours) are BLOCKING it every way they can…and costing us all billions and billions of dollars in the process. It’s sort of a self fulfilling prophesy…they block any attempt for a central repository and they they say ‘Behold…there is no place to put spent nuclear fuel! We should stop using nukes and start mumble, handwave, talkreallyfastaboutunprovenuntesttechnologies’.
Why yes, they do. Would you like to speculate as to WHY they do it that way?
What are you babbling about here? Who claims…what? Do you have a cite? Nuclear waste is dangerous for ‘a million years’? Sez who? What do you base that on?
This is the kind of ignorant drivel that the ant-nuke crowd has been pushing on the public for decades.
Cite? For any of this? I have no idea what you are talking about.
Though I commend you for not doing a drive by on this post (I want to encourage this behavior in you), I have no idea what you are saying here. Who knows they can make it cleaner? Coal fired plants or nuclear plants? How much would it cost realistically?
Do you have a cite for this? Who is refusing…and how much would it cut into their profits? Would they have to run at a loss and that is why they are refusing? Would they have to double their rates, and that is why they are refusing?
Why? Sez who? Since the citizens themselves seem to want it that way (for cheap and plentiful power)?
So…what’s the alternative? We need energy to drive our civilization. We need it to be plentiful. You are afraid of nuclear power because…well, never mind. You are. Wind/solar/geothermal/hydroelectric/pony power just won’t scale up to meet the majority of our needs. That leaves coal fired. Unless you are going to replace all the coal fired plants (and gods know what THAT would cost), we are kind of stuck with what we have…no? Well…what WOULD it cost to put the safety of the public and the good workers and peasants before nasty profit? Do youhave any idea (I ask because I actually don’t have any idea)?
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE5DB1F3AF937A15752C0A96E948260 I live about 30 miles from this beauty. It is run by GTE once a utility.
When the plant was shut down ,it was found that GTE violated several federal regulations. they also did not follow their own safety procedures. Nobody went to jail. Nobody ever does. They just get bigger bonuses and salaries.
We have not mentioned that these plants are great targets for terrorist attacks. There are a lot of plants and they provide the guards. I do not trust these jerks even a little bit.
With the continual creation of nuclear waste ,how far behind is a dirty bomb and a nuke attack. I hope never but I sweat these things . The waste is great for nuclear proliferation too.
Coal plants could be made a lot cleaner. The people around them suffer from emphysema and other related respiratory illnesses. The management fights cleaning them up with tooth and nail. They do not care about the health of the citizens.
You want to sell me. When these guys do something illegal or dangerous we send them to jail very publicly. Fine them heavily.
If possible, visit DOE and NRC regulated nuclear power facilities. Compare and contrast. Also visit fossil fuel fired power plants. Much of the complexity of a power plant is the same whether the hot rock is coal or uranium.
Also, large nuclear power plants are expensive to operate and maintain. The regulatory burden of nuclear is such that smaller, simpler, safer plant designs aren’t cost effective.
Whats the point? There are no legitimate incidents on the list. How many are OK for you? Quibbling about the list misses the point. A list can be made.
A list can be made for the how unsafe toothpicks are to society as well. It’s only when you look at relative risk that anything meaningful can be learned. Thus far your, um, cites haven’t proved that nuclear power is less safe than the alternative (i.e. coal fired plants)…in fact, by your own cites I actually think a case can be made that more folks die per year from those toothpicks than in accidents from nuclear plants.
Why yes actually…the risks seem relatively minor compared to the benefits (namely power). Those of us who have to live in the real world understand that there are trade offs to everything. Want more fuel efficient cars? Well, then you will probably be trading off something to get that…maybe safety, for instance. So…you get more deaths per year but you get more fuel efficiency. Is it worth it?
Using whatever explicit criteria you choose to define, make lists of the number of deaths and/or serious injuries you associate with coal and nuclear. Try to craft criteria generic enough to be used for both lists.
Then estimate the amount of energy produced from coal and nuclear power
Whichever has fewer deaths/injuries per joule is safer. Use SI prefixes and/or scientific notation as appropriate.
Our capacity to produce power right now is about 25% greater than what we use over the course of the year. We could increase total GWh/hr that much in a relative snap but we’d be producing it when no one wants it. (Well and we’d really need to upgrade our transmission lines to handle constant loads.) It’s our ability to produce energy during those peak times that meets that demand that is the issue, not the total GWh per year that we can make … unless we can effectively store energy produced off peak and release it during peak times.
As to the conversation regarding the safety of nuclear power. I would agree that coal is much more dangerous. Nuclear is scary to many for the same reasons that some are fearful of flying. Precisely because each episode is so unusual that it is “news” whereas each car accident (or death associated with coal) is just business as usual.
But I do not get this refrain that we need to scale up production of power urgently or the insistence that nuclear can accomplish that goal let alone that only nuclear can. I will not repeat my arguments in that regard.
And xtisme, your point of “if there IS enough viable wind power and if it IS cheaper, then why isn’t it going into wide scale use…” is silly. Renewables like wind are growing rapidly, and the technologies to make them cost-effective are fairly new or for some still emergent. To go from near zero to dominant in a few years is a bit much to ask don’t you think? But unlike nuclear plants, these technologies can be deployed quickly and in a widely distributed manner.
I see what you’re saying. I guess I’m looking at it from the standpoint that there’s no practical way even envisioned to store the Gigawatt-hours needed to truly even out the load, and folks don’t seem like they’re going to be any more open to major shifts in living than they are to even installing a programmable thermostat (see other thread on how much a programmable thermostat can save, and how only a minority of dwellings have them).
There was a lengthy thread in GQ about this, which concluded the same but had several citations.
Well, I don’t think we need “rapid” scaling up, I’ve only been talking about the fact that we have demand only going one way, and it’s fairly steady.
While wind power additions are growing rapidly, in terms of the total amount of net generation they are extremely low. And one thing which is impacting the growth right now is that wind installations are picking the low-hanging fruit. They’re putting the installations in the best Class places (4-5 and up, near transmission lines, etc.), and as those sites fill up the cost/benefit is going to get worse.
I have a lot of hope for wind and solar, but they need more support and more R&D. And I feel most of all that the average American could probably cut their overall energy use (petroleum + electric) by 50% if people actually gave a shit. Sadly, among the general public, even suggesting you install a programmable thermostat to save energy invokes images of Jimmy Carter, gas lines, etc.
