FTR, I’m still waiting for that list of nuclear power plants built or being built by Halliburton. Since nuclear isn’t my specialty, I’m simply not finding them.
What indications do you have that it can scale up to meet the majority of our needs in the same time frame it would take to make nuclear power plants. That WAS your point, wasn’t it?
I do not believe that these technologies can be either deployed/developed quickly OR widely distributed at this time. So…do you have a cite? Earlier a poster gave a cite for a European nation that has deployed the most wind power of any other nation (since their wind patterns make it viable)…and IIRC over the course of 5 years they have managed to build something like 10-20% of their total energy production from wind. That is impressive…but it kind of highlights the fact that even a nation who massively deploys this technology isn’t talking about the ability to replace the majority of it’s energy with it. Nuclear CAN do that…and in the same kind of time frame (5-6 years sounds about right if we can get all the eco-fascists types to get out of the way and stop all the law suits every time one of these things is proposed to be built).
-XT
According to the NYT worldwide capacity to bring new plants on-line for the next decade or so is 2 to 3 a year taking at least seven years each. Building the infrastructure to make more parts for plants will take time and there is no assurance that such will happen. Avg plant capacity between 1000 and 2000 MW. So that’s an optimistic capability to add 6000 MW/yr worldwide for the next decade anyway. Meanwhile Europe is expected to add over 5,000 MW/y of wind power per year by itself and the US is just getting going. That’s just wind. One part of a complete mix of options available. And there is no reason to believe that it cannot be scaled up faster if the market called for it. The infrastructure for building turbine is easier to make than foundries are for nuclear plant parts.
And those wind resources are coming on line now, not in seven plus years from now.
From your cite DSeid:
Bolding and underlining mine. Note…this is a pretty heavy investment on the part of the Euro’s…obviously a major effort on their part. And in return for this (over 7 consecutive years):
3.3% total. Check out what nuclear is already doing there:
You see a difference?
True, obviously in Europe anyway there is a major push on for these things. They are investing a LOT of capital in having it happen. Consider…what if they had a similar crash program for 7 consecutive years toward nuclear power? They are currently producing something like 30% from nuclear…with resistance in many countries. What if that resistance vanished?
Regardless, as I said earlier, if we can wait a few decades or a half century or so then wind/solar/alternative sources ought to be able to meet a large percentage of the demand…to be sure. It will take a huge investment, but then anything that is going to be an alternative to coal fired is going to take a pretty substantial investment. If we have those decades to tinker about then it’s all good.
-XT
-XT
Do you have a cite for that? Because in the 70’s the world was building them at 10 times that rate. It sounds like the number quoted reflects the number being built per year over the past 10 years, but that’s not really a fair comparison, because nuclear power fell out of favor because of excessive regulations, highly variable costs due to lawsuits, and the collapse in price of oil which made nuclear non-competitive.
Extrapolating current construction trends over the next 20 years after oil hits 100/bbl and opposition to nuclear subsides is not fair. I’m guessing the world could easily ramp up and start producing reactors at the rate of 50 per year or more if the demand was there and the economics are right.
As for the time it takes to build them, the 3-5 year time I quoted earlier is accurate, but it reflects actual construction time, not the extra time required for government red tape, hearings, etc. Texas is planning two reactors to start construction soon, and both are planned to be finished in 7 years, including the time necessary to get various regulatory approvals and sign-offs.
From this wikipedia cite:
Cites to the source documents for these figures are available in the the footnotes. I found it easier to cite this summary than to individually cite the various articles.
I’m a big fan of wind power, btw. There are areas where it works extremely well. But wind power requires huge land areas. Here in Alberta, we have the Pincher Creek power station. I’ve driven past it many times, and in fact drove past it yesterday. It’s huge. You can see it from miles and miles away. It’s situation in an ideal area - the Pincher Creek region is a natural venturi and chinook winds from the mountain cause constant, very high velocity winds in the region (the average wind speed is 21.5 km/h - not many places have that kind of wind). It’s maybe the best area for wind power in North America. Even so, generating 100 MW of power requires 7,000 acres of land usage.
Compare this to Epcor, which provides power for Edmonton. Epcor’s plants generate 3,400 MW of power. If all this power were generated by wind farms with the efficiency of the Pincher Creek farms, we would need 238,000 acres (371 square miles) of land, which is more land than the entire city itself uses. And of course, there isn’t that much premium wind location available, so the efficiency of a real-world plant would be much, much less than that of the smallish plants located in the absolute best locations around Pincher creek. Cut the efficiency in half, and you need twice the area and more than double the cost.
So call it 800 square miles of land to provide wind power for Edmonton. Add in another 800 square miles for Calgary, and maybe another 400 for Lethbridge, Red Deer, and the other small cities. That’s 2000 square miles of land just to provide power to southern and central Alberta. And we’re not very densely populated. And much of the land in question is prime farming land. Do you honestly think this is feasible? How about for New York City? Where would you put the wind farms?
There is just no way that wind is ever going to make up a large percentage of our power needs. Alberta is about as good as it gets in North America, and we might be able to generate 5-10% of our power from wind if we really work at it. Most other areas would generate far less.
And if you think nuclear would take a long time to ramp up, how long do you think it would take to get the permits, do the environmental studies, buy up properties (or fight for them using eminent domain), and construct wind farms on a scale we’re talking about? Hell, when a city has to expand by a few hundred acres it can kick off lawsuits and legal battles that can take ten years to resolve. Can you imagine trying to free up thousands of square miles of already owned land? And have functioning power plants up and running on that land in any reasonable time scale? I can’t.
Wind power is great for regions that are off the grid, or for isolated communities in regions with high winds. For example, one of the Pincher creek products is a 50MW wind farm that will provide all the power for a large Hutterite colony. Great idea.
But as generalized base-load power to supply the needs of a nation, wind will always be a marginal player.
Can we accomodate our future power needs by making current plants more efficient and by conserving energy? That’s possible, at least for the short term. At least in the U.S., which isn’t increasing its power needs by that much. Electric cars can use ‘smart’ chargers that talk to the power company over a network and can be controlled to use more power during off-peak times and to load-balance the network. I’ve seen figures that suggest that the current system can actually handle quite a large number of electrics, so long as they charge during off-peak times.
However… Are you suggesting that global warming is not a problem? Because your ‘solution’ is basically to maintain the status quo, and the status quo isn’t making environmentalists very happy. They want significant reductions in CO2 output, which means either learning how to sequester carbon at the source, or actually shutting down fossil fuel plants and replacing them with non-CO2 power.
That’s really the debate here, isn’t it? Not whether the current infrastructure can continue to provide our power needs, but how to transition away from the current infrastructure to one that doesn’t generate CO2. In that case, there is only one reasonable answer - nuclear power.
Um, actually, quibbling about the list is entirely the point. You act as if coal power is entirely safe, and any and every accident related to nuclear power, whether it be a high pressure steam leak in a nuclear plant, or some other innocuous industrial accident, is unique to nuclear power.
As I stated, coal powered plants are also dangerous places, and mining the vast amounts of coal, needed to power these plants, is a dangerous and damaging operation, both to the environment and the people involved with the mining.
Um xtisme, the issue isn’t what is already installed, it’s what can be installed in the next several years. Your belief was that renewables such as wind cannot be scaled up to meet new demands and that nuclear can. My position is that nuclear is no magic bullet for additional needs and that renewables are indeed being scaled up succesfully. Wind is an obvious case in point but others are getting close as well.
Sam You ask for the cite? Sure. As previously posted.
As to wind … once again I am not claiming that wind is the be-all and end-all either. It is just an easy example of the various means that are available now. There are large sections of the US that are suitable for wind. Europe’s map isn’t so much more impressive yet they are growing wind resources dramatically. Even 5 to 10% (which I think is a small estimate) would go along way as part of a multi-pronged approach. Of all places, Texas provides a model for this multi-pronged approach.
A diverse mix of energy sources and efficiency gains is the way to go.
Be real. Coal plants are not going away. We can convert the dirtiest to more efficient systems. We can sequester the carbon. We can meet new demands with more carbon neutral methods (and to a limited extent this includes nuclear.) We can increase efficiency of transmission and address issues of power reliability at the same time. We can take measures to reduce demand. But shuttering coal plants before they have reached the end of their expected lifetimes? Not gonna happen.
Here is a synopsis of why Nukes do not make sense. For example the argument about being cheap is wrong. We have granted the nuclear huge tax exemptions, 150 billion dollars in subsidies . This is part of the cost.
The Price /Anderson Act limits the liability of the plant constructors and operators . The bill is paid by taxpayers. The Idaho plant being planned has 1.25 billion in line from taxpayers.
They have unlimited loan guarantees(up to 80% of cost)
These are taxpayers money are are part of the costs.
They are not clean. They produce high and low levels of radioactivity while in operation. Disposal has never been resolved. There are now 200 metric tons of high level waste and 12 million cubic ft of low level waste produced. No country has solved what to do with it.
There is info the highjackers originally considered a nuke plant south of NYC as a target.
I see problems . I see catastrophic possibilities. I see the alternative energy forms as superior choices.
Part of the problem is money . Wind and solar are local . No big time power company will profit from solar panels on houses. They do not like it.
Again, this has been dealt with over and over. Coal produces radioactivity too. Disposal is a snap, and substantial amounts of materials can be reprocessed. Take the rest, and the radioactive parts of decommissioned plants and stick them in the middle of White Sands. Problem solved.
Did you actually read what I wrote? Because you don’t seem to have.
Nor have you done anything to prove that alternatives such as wind/alternatives CAN scale up to meet our needs. Read your own cite…after 7 years of fairly intense expansion in wind they are at a whopping 3% of the total energy output in Europe.
The majority of Europe’s energy is, IIRC, generated from natural gas with coal being the second and nuclear the third (at 30%). Alternatives are marginal, even today. Seriously…do you understand what scaling up means? What kind of total energy we are talking about here? I don’t mean this in a derogatory way…you really don’t seem to get it. Go back and look at your cite, then look at the other C02 free alternatives…then compare ALL of them in power generated to anything in the top 3 generators in Europe or the US. The amount generated by ALL the alternatives is VERY small in comparison.
Your position at the start of this thread was that nuclear isn’t viable at all economically or in any other way. This is far from saying now that nuclear isn’t a magic bullet…no one is saying nuclear is a magic bullet in this thread, including me. I’m saying nuclear is the only technology that can scale up to replace C02 generating power plants…wind/solar/alternative CAN NOT SCALE UP TO MEET OUR ENERGY NEEDS IN ANY KIND OF REASONABLE TIME FRAME…IF EVER. They can and will be important as alternative sources of energy to fill in the gaps in our energy (and allow us to build a few less expensive power plants)…where they are viable (which is why the European’s are investing heavily in it where it can be used effectively).
If you have now shifted your position such that you agree that nuclear will play a major role in any kind of CO2 free energy future but that wind and other alternatives will also play important roles…well, then what are we arguing about exactly? This has been my position all along…nuclear isn’t a magic silver bullet. It is however a very important piece in any serious discussion about replacing our existing C02 generating power plants…it’s the ONLY currently available and viable alternative to such replacement in fact.
If you still feel alternatives can scale up to meet the bulk of our energy needs then you are going to have to demonstrate this…because the cites you have provided so far do no such thing. Your Wiki cite in fact pretty clearly demonstrates the opposite if you read through it carefully. A realistic look at solar power will show the same thing…as will looking at geothermal, hydroelectric and the other clean alternatives. Your cite showing the POTENTIAL for wind has already been shot down. As noted by others there is a lot of potential in a lot of things…solar for instance. Tides. Rolling rocks down large hills. But translating that potential into a viable and scalable source of power in the quantities we are talking about here is something that we won’t be ready to do for decades…if ever. It’s like saying fusion will solve all our problems…if we could just work out the pesky problem of making it work.
If that is the case then I guess we live with the whole GW thingy. Because nuclear is the only alternative to replacing all those coal fired plants. If that is cool…well, then it is.
As for all these magic things that let us ‘convert the dirtiest to more efficient systems’, and ‘sequester the carbon’ and all…well, those are all going to entail essentially rebuilding those power plants ANYWAY. So…I don’t see why (assuming we can get those hippies out of the way) we wouldn’t just invest in new nuclear plants instead of re-building coal plants that will STILL (most likely) produce some C02 emissions. Use all your wonderful alternatives to close the gap and pick up a few percentage points (hell, lets be generous and say your alternatives can pick up 20-30% of the load in the next decade or two)…and use nuclear to replace the older and dirtier coal fired plants. Eventually replace all of the C02 emitting plants with C02 free nuclear or alternatives.
The only thing is…if we have to do it NOW, and if we are actually serious about all this C02/Global Warming crisis stuff then we need to start closing coal plants today, in job lots. And the only thing we have that will fill the gap in our energy output if we DO start doing that is…nuclear.
-XT
xtisme I am sorry but you seem to be the one unable to get what “scaling up” means.
I know of no one, Al Gore or climate scientist, or any one, other than you, who is claiming that we either need to replace all our coal fired plants or else “live with the whole GW thingy.” Seriously. No one. There isn’t enough uranium in the world to do it anyway.
And no, retooling the dirtiest plants and/or adding sequestration technologies is not the same as “essentially rebuilding those power plants ANYWAY.” Let alone the same as building nuclear plants to replace coal plants that are early to midlife. I’ve provided evidence that nuclear isn’t even up to the task of providing for expected increased needs; it certainly isn’t capable of replacing extant power generation.
I have, btw, acknowledged (and found additional) sources that show that my original cite was indeed wrong when it stated that nuclear was, over the plant lifetime, much more expensive than other power sources.
I like the Toshiba apartment-building size reactors. Those could really be handy in cities.
I’m re-writing my post to take the snark out…I don’t want to get into a huge fight here.
I disagree but will leave it to the readers to decide which one of us does or does not seem to understand this concept. I will note however that you didn’t actually address the points I made and have shifted the goal posts away from your earlier position on alternatives and leave it at that.
I disagree that I am the only one saying that coal fired plants are a major problem and would need to be re-fitted or replaced with zero or low C02 emitting plants because of Global Warming. I find it hard to take this part of your post serious when you say things like this.
Additionally I would love to see a cite from you showing that there isn’t enough uranium world wide. Even without considering breeder reactors and re-processing or sea water extraction this is an incredible statement…can you back it up?
What are the estimated costs for retooling dirty coal fired plants? What is the approximate cost of adding carbon sequestering technologies to existing plants?
I’ve seen no evidence by you that proves that nuclear isn’t up to taking on more of the load from coal fired/natural gas plants. Europe currently generates aprox. 30% of it’s total energy from nuclear…and the US something around 20%. And this after literally decades of the anti-nuclear crowd demonizing nuclear power and doing everything in it’s power to prevent, delay or otherwise block it’s use.
Well, I actually agreed with your original assessment that it was more expensive (i.e. I would have been wrong to, if indeed that isn’t the case). I don’t think that straight cost is going to ultimately be the main factor if indeed AGW is the threat people think it is…and if dire solutions are needed.
-XT
Let’s start with the question of uranium. It appears that I’m partly right and partly wrong.
But, continuing along, and linking to the referenced cite there is still plenty of uranium to be had, just lower quality and harder to get. The additional costs go beyond dollars and cents:
I honestly have never ever heard any one propose that we should close down all the coal plants before hearing it from you. Who have you heard advising that? Really. No new coal plants? Yes, I’ve heard that. Shuttering the oldest and dirtiest? Yes. Refitting others? Yes. Sequestration? Yes. But replacing the whole lot with nuclear would cost … how much? Let’s see, expected costs are about $2-5 billion per plant. (And are infamous for going way over budget.) Figure you’d need 400 of them to replace coal plants in the US. So you are talking one to two trillion dollars. That’s about half of the entire US Federal budget! I doubt that that could even be hidden in the War budget! If you could get the supplies and the qualified workforce.
No, I have never imagined additional nuclear plants or renewables scaling up to replace all coal plants. My consideration has been only how to meet additional needs and how to replace generating capacity that ages out. That’s the scale of this discussion. I have not changed the goal post in that regard. I never claimed that “nuclear isn’t viable at all economically or in any other way” or anything similar. My claim remains that “nuclear is not the choice of the future” to meet those needs, not when it comes with unsolved problems, when other solutions (such as various efficiency gains at the plants, along transmission lines, and on the demand side, and such as peak shaving and valley filling techniques) can do more good faster, and when other carbon neutral power sources can meet near term additional needs for, if not less, then at least not more cost. I have been very consistent in this regard.
As to the costs of retooling old plants and of sequestering … we’ve covered that already. Less than either most renewables, a fraction of the cost of new coal plants, let alone the cost of new nuclear plants. Coal is cheap enough that even with sequestration it is still a good deal. The Science article I had linked to claimed sequestration would add about 20% to the cost of coal generated power.
Did I miss any of your points?
The Science article is incorrect IMO if it says 20%, and what you quoted in here said 50% on the first page of the thread. I can’t read the article since you cited something that no one here is going to have access to unless they go to the library; you might consider some quoting of it or providing access to it.
Given that carbon capture devices take from 25% to 40% of the net generation of the plant to operate, there is no way that they can be only a 20% increase.
And what’s the largest carbon capture plant in continuous operation? Elsam is going to capture something like 1 ton per hour. The AEP plant in Australia is supposed to work on the slipstream of a 30MW plant to capture about 10MW worth of carbon. And in late 2011 (actually, now I hear 2013) they want to put one on a 450MW unit. But how much is their 10MW test unit going to cost?
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/40901/newsDate/16-Mar-2007/story.htm
Possibly $600 million capital cost to capture the CO2 at a 10MW plant? Now, consider how many orders of magnitude different that is from the total coal power generation in the US.
Allow me share a real-world example looking at todays technology, in the real world of sending out bids to OEMs and saying “no, really, how much will it actually cost?” I’m working with a 2x800MW unit right now that is evaluating carbon capture/sequestration, which sadly I cannot give too much other information about. We sent out an RFP as owner’s engineer on how much it would cost to install CO2 capture at this 2x800MW unit, and here’s the best numbers thus far:
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Capital cost estimates ranged from $800M to $1.4B per unit ($1.6B to 2.8B total).
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Pipeline cost to sequestration field: $300M to $1.0B, depending upon where it goes to. That is, there is a field that can take about 5 to 6 years of CO2 that is within $300M of reach, but if they want to go out to fields that can take all the CO2 they can make, they need to spend a lot more. People talk glibly in the press of stuffing teratons of CO2 into all these oil reservoirs, and I’m telling you, the reality is very different. Many coal plants are very remote, and just building a pipeline for the CO2 alone is a daunting task in terms of dollars. Never mind the NIMBY’s all along its 1000-mile length who will throw up lawsuits every single mile (I’ve read the “town meeting” statements where community activists portray CO2 as a “DEADLY INVISIBLE GAS” that can suffocate an elementary school in seconds if the pipeline ever leaks. Bodies of fresh-faced toddlers stacked like cordwood.)
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O&M cost of the system: Roughly 22 to 50 mills/kWh. That’s 2.2 to 5 cents per kWh. There’s a lot of uncertainty here, as no one knows what the 20-year O&M NPV is for a system like this. Current generation costs at the plant are about 3.5 cents per kWh.
And none of this is taking into account the LAC of the bonds to support capital construction, which will add…I’m not sure, I didn’t see those numbers. More than an extra cent per kWh, I would guess.
OK, given that one, single case, building a new nuclear plant would most likely be a much more economic alternative. Since this utility has no real wind capacity where it’s located, and no gas pipeline capability, and they’re under a mandate to cut CO2 from a controlling third-party who I will not name…the utility has decided that the best option at this point is to shut down the plant entirely, fire everyone, and walk away. But wait, says the State, you can’t leave a 1.6GW hole in the grid like that, you must stay open. The State also says the utility shouldn’t be charging more than 1 cent per kWh for CO2 capture to the ratepayers, and wants to know why they’re saying it’s going to cost so much.
And given that a 450MW plant (about 25% of the capacity for this single unit) as a demo by AEP is perhaps 5-7 years off, I don’t know, how will they succeed? We don’t know. Most likely, nothing will happen. There may be better cases, and worse ones, but this plant is in a typical situation for a large plant which is not located adjacent to a sequestration dome or oil field.
Still waiting for that cite on which nuclear plants Halliburton built or is building. I freely admit they may have, but I can’t find any. But since you made the claim, you surely must have that information handy, so it’s perhaps easiest if you would share it with folks here.
Also, you might want to address your other claim of:
…which I showed with cites was not true. Who are the “Bushies” who stopped these suits that don’t seem to actually have been stopped?
My apologies. 50% it is. I misread. The author somehow concludes the bill to consumers would go up only 20% and looking for the figure quickly I misread that as the increased cost. And I admit that I don’t get it.
So okay, sequestration is not yet ready as an economically viable option except in a very few cases. At least we’ve agreed that efficiency gains are.
Una a whole different subject, while I’ve got you. My eldest was telling me about the ongoing coal fire in Centralia Pennsylvania and I have since found out that there are quite a few of these going, releasing millions of tons of CO2 with no benefit gained. Okay, I can understand that no one has figured how to put them out, but isn’t there some way to at least harness the energy being produced and use it? I can find one source that talks about purposefully setting off coal fires for “in situ gasification” (scary) … how about using ones that are already there? Or using emergent geothermal techniques? Is there no way to capture some fraction of this energy given that the fires can’t be put out?
That’s an interesting topic. I think the main problem is that there is no control over the energy from the fire, and therefore it’s hard to use the energy. For example, since the fire is so widespread, how does one economically apply heat exchangers to get energy? My understanding is that the hot gas from it emerges from innumerable small natural vents and cracks, and so you’d end up having to put all sorts of small heat exchangers all over the place. I really don’t know; I’m just speculating.
There are a couple of problems with burning the coal in-situ, although there are lots of R&D projects to see if there’s anything viable. Again, that’s something I don’t know much about.
http://scottageb.blogspot.com/2006/02/halliburton-sold-nuclear-reactor.html
These are the kind of people who make the plants. They will do anything for profit. They will cut safety and training to make money.
I’m sorry, but that Wiki cite proves nothing. I’m at work, but a quick google search turns up this cite that discusses uranium reserves. Note in the first box that “Considering the kilo (kg) of uranium that may be obtained at costs below US$130.00, the world reserves are distributed as follows:” IOW, this is the reserve that can be obtained for LESS than $130/kg…and doesn’t include the vast reserves that can be obtained for more than that. Nor does this discuss things like breeder reactors or re-processing of spent fuels.
Even if we ONLY look at the cheap, easy to get uranium reserves (and I would be surprised if this were ALL of the cheap reserves in any case as exploration hasn’t exactly been intense for this resource…unlike oil, where even there they are discovering new reserves occasionally even today), this doesn’t mean that fuel would only be able to be supplied to reactors for ‘only for a few years’, because it doesn’t take into account re-processing or breeder reactors…nor does it take into account that the price of the fuel is only one factor in nuclear power generation from a cost perspective.
Well, I would dispute that all of the uranium left is of ‘lower quality’, though I agree that eventually all the low hanging fruit will be gone and we’ll have to go to more expense to get to new, harder to reach sources. Sort of like, well, oil. As we ramped up into an oil economy we rapidly used up all the easy to reach sources and so had to start actually going out and looking for NEW sources…and developing technology to get to those sources in harder to reach areas. Uranium extraction is still in the equivalent of the time when Texas was a major source of oil.
-XT