Quoth constanze, in regards to nukes:
Such as?
C’mon, we’ve had that discussion a few times. Facts don’t change their minds.
Or gas fired back up built in.
Or an improved HVDC grid that interconnects various alternative energy sources such that individual site and source intermittency is smoothed out.
Or utilizing some of these alternate energy methods in a more distributed manner - on the roofs of factories for solar, for example - such that grid loads from current plants are spared and new capacity and new strains on the current grid are relieved.
OTOH the mega-batteries for substation storage are actually not all that expensive really, not compared to the cost of maintaining spinning reserves in current traditional plants, and as it allows spikes in demands to be handled without having to surge through the grid’s backbone, the cost of upgrading the backbone of the grid to handle ever increasing demands.
And some of those other storage methods that you dismiss as “extremely inefficient or very limited” are, while far from 100% efficient, not so bad either. Generally I’ve read about 75% efficient for pumped storage hydroelectricity.
In any case until alternate energy generation sources are a much higher portion of any regional mix than they are likely to be for a very long time, the management of its intermittency is no more difficult than dealing with the current needs based on variations in load demands and allowing for system failures. The big plants exist and only a few of the dirtiest are due to be mothballed. They can continue to provide the backbone for many years; we have many years to go of building much more new capacity with alternate sources before we reach a point that the alternate sources are anything other than “smaller bones.”
You can argue what alternative sources can do in theory, but the fact of the matter is that France already gets 90% of their power from carbon free sources. 80% of their electricity comes from nuclear power and 10% from hydroelectric. They have very cheap electricity. They export electricity to other countries. They have 59 nuclear power plants in a country smaller than Texas. The per capita greenhouse gas output of France is 1/3 that of the United States.
Argue all you want about theoretical solutions to AGW, but the proven solution, the shovel ready solution is nuclear power. Environmentalists that aren’t paralyzed by a superstitious dread of anything with the word nuclear in it have realized that the risks of using nuclear power pale in comparison to the risks of not using nuclear power.
Not profitable. If they were profitable there would be lots of applications put in and ground breaking, etc. But in the US, where they must compete to be put in, nobody wants to begin such a project without socializing the risk and privatizing the profit. Otherwise we would see them. They are legal.
Oh, and Chernobyl. Very inconvenient fact of history. Yes, a Chernobyl event requires a Chernobyl design. And Supersafeium design with be subject to Supersafeium type risks, which we do not yet know about. Even pebble beds have accidents. Murphy’s law of common sense has always defeated engineer’s attempts to build safe reactors, roads, bridges, trains, planes, ships etc. Only an engineer or physicist could truly understand the hubris and arrogance of engineers and physicists who promise something is safe.
And all forms of energy creation have subsidization costs.
Profit being the driving motive behind raising the capital to get these projects going, the capital is choosing wind, coal, solar, natural gas, oil and just about anything but nuclear.
If only there were no lawsuits? Bull. All businesses are subject to lawsuits. It is a cost of doing business.
Those bizarre guys in the white shirts and narrow ties at the airports and their modern counterparts on the internet are no less religious than the Hare Krishnas.
The massive subsidies that utilities require in order to make building new plants economically viable make for strange bedfellow: Cato is louder than the Left when it comes to dissing the myth that nuclear is “cheap”:
Nuclear got huge subsidies in its early days in R&D money and is only built today when governments foot the bill or at least absorb all the risk.
A half-million cubic feet of concrete? 3.74 million gallons? For a single turbine?
And you didn’t laugh in his face or spit on him?
Actually, it looks like stone. I tried to find one direct shot by a camera but got bored after an hour. looking at it from birds-eye view it looks like gravel. There has to be a road bed into these things. They are huge and heavy.
Plus, consider a few things:
Average US Residental electricity cost - take an estimate of $0.10 / kwh (source: EIA)
Now take an upper limit of production/installation costs. $3M seems a fair estimate. My company supplies a major manufacturer of wind turbines so I’m not totally in the dark here.
Next take a lowish power output. 2,000 kW. This is low - see MWT62 and MWT9264.
Even then, disregarding maintenance, it pays back for installation in like what, 1.7 years?
Yes, but what is the source of the risk? It is anti-nuclear activists who cause the years of regulatory and legal delays that add billions to the construction costs. They complain that nuclear power is too risky for investment, but they are the one’s that create the risk.
The Long Island Lighting Company spent spent 6 billion dollars (10 billion in current dollars) building Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant and the government never issued them an operating license. Investors would have to be insane to build a Nuclear Power Plant without guarantee that it won’t happen again. That is a government loan guarantee does. If the government doesn’t allow the plant to open, then they will be on the hook for the loan.
http://depletedcranium.com/why-i-hate-the-nrc/
China builds nuclear power plants for half what it costs us, because they don’t have to deal with Greenpeace or the NRC. They have 24 nuclear power plants under construction right now and a total of 56 planned by the end of 2011.
And they will have a catastrophic event risk commensurate with the number of installed reactors that they have.
As for the hippies stopping nuclear power, that isn’t what stopped it in this country. Three Mile Island’s partial melt down made it a very broad reluctance to agree to take the nuclear risk. The nuclear people told us that it couldn’t happen. They were mistaken. Then they told us that what happened at TMI couldn’t in theory be any worse. Then Chernobyl happened. Since then these experts have said that a Chernobyl meltdown can only happen at plants with the Chernobyl design. Of course, TMI also had a meltdown. Windscale had a meltdown. Hanford had a meltdown, etc. In short, these very well meaning people are mistaken. I’m sure that they aren’t lying because they actually believe what they are saying that meltdowns are not possible and not that bad when they happen. But we do not trust their expertise in their area of professional expertise because it is mistaken and their blindness to the risks of events happening isn’t shared by the public. All of us in our work experience know that the impossible happens and that it is most unpleasant.
Mike Rowe did a segment on Dirty Jobs. Working inside a wind turbine isn’t easy. Very tight spaces.
this episode recap describes the difficulties technicians face serving turbines.
http://www.tv.com/dirty-jobs/wind-farm-technician/episode/1198513/recap.html
Um, no.
The risk of the investment is not those damn anti-nuclear activists. It is simply that it is a lot of money gambled and the industry has a track record of having these very big and very complex construction projects take much longer and cost much more than initially estimated.
Don’t get me wrong, I think we need some new nuclear as part of our future mix, and the only way to get it is to subsidize it. But nuclear is no more a shovel ready cheap power panacea than wind is ready to provide baseline power all on its own. We couldn’t build nuclear fast enough no matter how much we threw at it and it is not the free market choice. Alternative energy can be deployed faster while the inadequate number of nuclear plants we can build (with subsidies) are in the very slow pipeline. Utility grade mega batteries at substations can relieve some of the current strain on the system to provide enough capacity at peak demands and particularly with sudden spikes, and relive some strain on the grid while it is gradually upgraded as well, and in the process reduce the need to resort to expensive “peaker” plants as often, which are already there to deal with mismatches between supply and demand caused by demand side (and are just as functional to deal with mismatches caused by supply side).
The reality is that there is no single solution for our future energy needs. Not “drill baby drill” (obviously now), not nuclear, not wind, not solar, not “clean” (okay, “less dirty”) coal, not energy shifting. We will need to deploy a variety of solutions at the same time. And we need to get a move on. Price the carbon fairly and let them compete.
Nope. But it makes the treehuggers happy, kills pesky rare native birds and sends the country folk in the vicinity mad from the low frequency noise pollution. So it’s not all bad.
Zero-point energy the next natural progression.
Are there any non-snake-oil implementations of that?
Um, the Chinese don’t give a shit about the enviroment, they also don’t give a shit about their own people, so they can cut corners. Why is coal from China so much cheaper? Because they cut corners in their mines, and as a result, they have the highest accident rates and fatalities in the world for coal mines. Yeah, a good idea to go nuclear for them.:rolleyes:
If it were possible to extract usable energy from the zero-point field, then it would carry with it a significant risk of destroying the entire Universe as we know it. The fact that the Universe has not yet been destroyed in this manner is thus good evidence for it not being possible.
And, OK, China’s not the best example for how to do things safely or well, but what about France? If they can do it, we can, too.
Wind Turbine Technician was a featured occupation in season 3 of the Dirty Jobs show. Changing the oil in the gearbox looked as if it had the maximum misery factor. All the defunct bugs must be cleaned off the blades twice yearly.
[QUOTE=Chronos;12804278The fact that the Universe has not yet been destroyed in this manner is thus good evidence for it not being possible.[/QUOTE]
A borrow from the old Steve Martin joke;
Remember back when we tried out that zero point energy thing and destroyed the Universe? Then we had to move to this Universe and they decided not to tell the stupid people because they thought it might upset them?
Large propeller style wind turbines need a windy location in order to produce electricity and even then it cannot be relied on as a primary source of electricity. There are a limited number of places they can be placed. they are not pleasant to live next to given current standards. I have yet to fly over a farm that looked remotely productive. That could easily be a function of flying in nice weather but a farm of 80+ generators sitting idle isn’t a useful facility. That means we need ANOTHER power source to back them up or a storage facility and additional wind turbines to cover the slack time. That still requires backup for peak use, down time and really unusual gaps in wind flow.
Solar makes sense in locations that have consistent light and it would be possible to store the energy in heat form for minor fluctuations.
The only practical power source that can be located anywhere in the country is nuclear and coal. Coal would make sense if the co2 can be scrubbed and used to make bio-diesel. It would greatly reduce (and recycle) co2 going into the air.
IMO, wind would be more practical if smaller vertical turbines were used. we could take advantage of building shapes and funnel the air into turbine corridors. Instead of tying wind turbines into the grid, we should tie them to individual buildings or groups of buildings.