Global Warming and the Necessity for Nuclear Power

Great Debates
61

Oh for God’s sake. No deception was intended. I just used the figures I could find without turning a simple post into a research project. In fact, one of the reasons for the different measurements is that a lot of the stats online are presented to make solar look better than it is. For example, a lot of cites I found just showed the growth in solar, which looks very impressive on charts until you realize that the steep curve just means a jump from .05% to .08% or some similar small number.

But I would rather talk about solar and wind than ‘renewables’, because ‘renewables’ includes energy sources that are specific to certain countries and already saturated. For example, hydro power typically makes up a large portion of many country’s ‘renewables’ statistics, but you can’t just ramp up hydro power if you don’t have the resources for it. So saying that country A gets 35% of its power from ‘renewables’ isn’t very useful as a guide to policy in another country if that country doesn’t have hydro or geothermal resources.

If we could get to, say, 60% of world energy production from ‘renewables’, that will almost certainly have to be done primarily by ramping up wind and solar, as they are the only renewable power sources that can apply to almost any country and that aren’t already employed. The amount of hydro power is not likely to increase more than a few percentage points from where it already is, as most of the best hydro resources have been developed already. in addition, new hydro projects face huge regulatory hurdles. Canada’s one new hydro project in BC is currently stalled in legal battles - after being 70% completed.

I didn’t ‘carefully ignore it’. I thought it was common knowledge. And it didn’t matter for the point I was making. Or if you’d like, you can re-state it this way - Germany could do far more for its CO2 output by simply converting to natural gas turbines than by trying to festoon the country in solar panels. BTW, love how you worked in the ‘George Bush Recession’. It shows just how impartial and fair you are being. Gotta work in those shots against Bush at any opportunity, eh?

It might be a good idea to refrain from using phrases like "The carbon-blasting U.S.’ in a message supposedly aiming to show the perfidious bias of my OP.

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None of this, of course, in any way negates the various genuine benefits of nuclear power as an energy source. It just confirms that you can’t look to Sam Stone’s post for an honest and thorough appraisal of the comparative benefits and costs.
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So even though you actually agreed with the point in the OP, you thought it was important for this thread to jump in and take an ad-hominem shot at me, just in case anyone should develop the idea that I might be a reasonable poster? Can’t have that, can we?

62

I don’t see why that’s an issue. For comparison, Kansas alone has 5000 square miles of irrigated farmland. The 10 biggest ranches in Texas add up to more than 7000 square miles.

63

It’s an old tactic the pro-nuke crowd uses. They used to do it with wind turbines, “calculating” that we’d have to literally blanket every square inch of the Earth with wind turbines.

64

There’s a big difference between irrigation farming and covering every square inch of land with steel framing and silicon. Have you actually seen an irrigation farm? One set of rolling sprinklers can cover many acres of land. It’s not the kind of industrial construction that would be required for large solar plants.

65

You honestly don’t see the issue with manufacturing and installing (and maintaining) literally billions of solar panels? You really think that manufacturing and installing solar panels is the equivalent of irrigating farm land?? Out of curiosity about the
‘10 biggest ranches in Texas’, how many years do you figure it took to build those out? Was it 1 year you think? 5? Maybe 10? How long have those ranches been worked to get to the size they are? Just in round terms, of course. We’ll just pretend that solar panels are exactly the same as irrigation infrastructure for the sake of this discussion.

Wonder why everyone hasn’t just magically put in 5000 square miles (and I looked it up…it’s actually a lot more by most estimates) of solar panels and just gone full solar, since it’s so easy and no one here can see any issues with this.

[QUOTE=levdrakon]
It’s an old tactic the pro-nuke crowd uses. They used to do it with wind turbines, “calculating” that we’d have to literally blanket every square inch of the Earth with wind turbines.
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It’s an old trick that the anti-nuke crowd uses…the rest of us call it a ‘strawman’.

66

Though maybe we are talking past each other…those of you who think it would be a piece of cake to put in all these panels (scr4 and Frankenstein Monster mainly), what sort of time table are you thinking for this? A decade? 2? Or a year or 2? If you are thinking 2 decades then, while I think the challenge is more than you think I also think it’s workable. Maybe even 1 decade if we really went balls to the wall with manufacturing and deployment. So, what are you guys thinking there?

I still think that building 100 nuclear power plants, especially of the latest generation would be less difficult than this (leaving aside the political impossibility of getting even 10 of them actually ever built), which was the original point.

67

It’s not just a matter of day and night. What are you going to do if it stays cloudy for a week? Or a month?

This is not hypothetical. Here in Alberta we’re making a major push for solar energy. We currently get 67% of our electricity from coal, and our idiotic government has decreed that all coal plants be shut down by 2030. We have no hydro or geothermal resources to speak of, so their answer to the shortfall is massive investment in solar power, which will bring ‘good, green jobs’ to Alberta and allow us to ‘lead the fight against climate change’.

Now, the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology runs a solar panel reference system, to track actual solar performance around the year. The data from the inverters is posted directly to the internet, so you can see real-time and historical performance.

NAIT Solar Array Data

Notice a very critical thing about that chart: There is a huge amount of month-to-month variation in power output. In July, the array produced 393 kWh of power. In November, it produced 93.58 kWh, or only 23% as much. And I can tell you that November was a mild month here with almost no snow.

So if you want to get 100% of your power from solar, you would have to build an infrastructure that can provide 100% in November, which means it will be 5X overbuilt for July. Or if we just want to replace the 67% of electricity we currently get from coal, we’ll need to build a system that could provide 3.5X our entire electricity needs in July. That’s incredibly expensive and unfeasible. That’s why Germany can hit 100% of its power needs on occasional bright sunny days, but still only provide 6.5% of its power over the year.

And to make matters worse for northern countries, our peak power needs come in the months where solar output is the lowest. So we have a major disconnect between the capability of solar power and the needs of society.

Oh, and guess what happens in a snowstorm? All your power goes offline, right when you need it most. And that power isn’t coming back until you either climb up on your roof and clear the snow away, or wait for it to melt. Around here, you could be waiting some time for that. Guess what the result will be when tens of thousands of people climb up on icy roofs to clear their panels after a storm? Look up the stats on annual deaths from falls, and think about it.

Now notice that in November there was a period of 7 days in a row where the array generated less than 1 kWh of power in a day. That’s what happens when it clouds over for days on end. Your Tesla battery will run out on the first day. What are you going to do after that?

These are real world numbers, not happy predictions by solar industry shills and activists.

There are many other problems. For example, in northern latitudes the optimum angle for solar panels varies dramatically between winter and summer. NAIT found that the optimum summer angle is 18 degrees, but the optimum winter angle is 53 degrees. But rooftop solar installations are rarely adjustable, so the actual angle will be a compromise between the two, limiting efficiency. In addition, the solar panels must be oriented due south for reasonable efficiency, which rules out half of the roof space at a minimum.

And finally, the amount of solar energy we get in the first place is a little more than half of what you get in California, due to our inclination to the sun.

Have a look at this map of North American Solar Insolation. Note that any estimates for solar power based on what can be done in California does not apply to half the country, and certaintly doesn’t apply to Canada.

But that hasn’t stopped the ideologues in the NDP here from going full-speed ahead with shutting down our electricity sources. Either this will get overturned by the next government, or Albertans will be spending a lot of time freezing in the dark. We just had a 3 hour blackout here two days ago. And let me tell you, when it’s -20 outside and the power is out and you can feel the house cooling off, it can be pretty worrying. Downright terrifying if the blackout goes on for days. That’s when people start dying.

68

For some odd reason Germany resists being dependent on Russian pipelines.
Maybe there’s some history there.

69

And so much for avoiding not giving the impression to others that your points do omit items to make the narrative of fear sound better. What I have read is that a lot of what you point here is actually a straw man, they did not say that; Alberta and NDP does look to a 30% renewables energy target for 2030 and to use Natural Gas for a lot of the rest. So much for the FUD that it is just about the same old points from contrarians that implies (and it is wrong) that the proponents of change want to sent all to the stone age.

70

Of course I do. I wasn’t sure why the 5,000 square miles was supposed to be a scary number, so I was just trying to put it in perspective. If the manufacturing cost is the issue, then they should have quoted the cost, not the area.

71

Try getting one built. I think there’s only one being built right now, assuming it hasn’t already been canceled, even with Obama’s incentives. I don’t even have to bother looking it up to know it’s already way over budget and behind schedule.

I remember you touting these small reactors we’re supposed to bury in our backyards or some silly thing. Ready in five years! Last time I checked the company almost went bankrupt and now they’ve pretty much completely abandoned all their promises and as far as I know they still haven’t accomplished anything substantive.

Here was the hype back in '08: Mini nuclear plants to power 20,000 homes | Nuclear power | The Guardian

Here they are now, still haven’t done anything but suck up more govt money: http://www.gen4energy.com/

You want 100 reactors?? I suppose you want reprocessing too, and of course if the US does it, the whole world should do it, so how many reactors is that? Most developing nations couldn’t handle the technology and couldn’t use it while solar and wind are much better energy solutions for them. Plus you want reprocessing technology in their hands?

72

Where is the ‘scary’ business coming from? What I was trying to point out is the reality. Leaving aside the cost, think about how you’d actually manage to manufacture that many panels. Full stop. How would you do it? How would every company in China going full out do it? It’s more panels than the US has deployed in over a decade of ramping up solar…and we are the 2nd or 3rd largest in absolute terms for deployment of the things.

As to the cost we are talking hundreds of billions or even trillions from what I’ve read. Leaving aside that and leaving aside all of the other realities (such as clouds, that night time stuff and snow storms…and just dirt), the manufacturing alone SHOULD give someone pause. Yet both you and Frankenstein Monster were pretty much like ‘oh, no problem, no issues’. I’m just trying to figure out where that comes from.

73

I posted this link several times in other threads, but this is what I would do.

You create enough solar panels (or alternate renewable power plants of your choice) to provide an excess beyond demand. The excess power is diverted into a gravity storage solution like in the attached link. Cloudy days, you draw from the gravity storage, sunny days the excess goes back. This is way more simple than nuclear engineering. Anyways, there seems to be an assumption that it is necessary to convert every single fossil fuel plant to renewable. It’s not, a 50% turnover would be enormous progress to fight climate change.

74

[QUOTE=levdrakon]
I remember you touting these small reactors we’re supposed to bury in our backyards or some silly thing. Ready in five years! Last time I checked the company almost went bankrupt and now they’ve pretty much completely abandoned all their promises and as far as I know they still haven’t accomplished anything substantive.
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You have a link to me touting (touting? :p) small reactors ‘or some silly thing’? Feel free as I’d be interested in my advocating that, let alone thinking it was something that was going to happen.

You do realize that’s pretty much what I said in the part you quoted, right? It would be less costly and be easier EXCEPT that it’s politically impossible.

I do want 100 reactors…and if folks were serious about global climate change they would want it too. Instead, we are still fucking around and trying to build one older generation plant…and not doing a very good job of that.

As for other countries, which ones are you talking about? Germany who is turning from nuclear can certainly handle it. China…well, it’s not a matter of choice, they are building the things as they see fit. India has them and is the other large polluter. US has them. Many European nations have them or could have them. Japan is turning away from them, but they obviously can ‘handle the technology’. In fact, just about every fully modern and highly industrial state who is a large CO2 producer can and in most cases already does have the tech or is turning away from it by choice. So…who, exactly, are you afraid of getting reprocessing technology? The only country I can think of who could build it but hasn’t and we really don’t want them to is Iran.

75

I agree, as long as that solution isn’t “take the waste and dump it into a hole in the ground where it is out of sight.”, or truck it out to a desert, or dump it in benthic ocean regions. Not only is that not a cost-effective or secure, it also puts what may someday in the foreseeable future be a valuable resource, particularly if the scope of power production using fissile and fissionable fuels expand by orders of magnitude.

Here’s the essential reality of energy policy; no one source of energy is suitable or cost effective for all areas where power is needed. Some sources are have large up front costs for installation and development but are very cheap once established (solar, wind, geothermal). Others are relatively cheaper in installation but have large and often hidden costs (coal, natural gas). Some are innately expensive and not very mature compared to the high criticality of a catastrophic failure (Generation III nuclear fission) even if the probability of failure is much lower than other forms. Some are suited for centralized production and distribution over a grid (coal, nuclear fission), while others are better suited to local or regional production (natural gas, hydroelectric, geothermal, solar, wind), or transportation (liquid hydrocarbon). Some can be modified to be reduced net carbon output (synthesized and biogenic liquid hydrocarbons) while others have hidden costs in terms of carbon footprint (hydroelectric, nuclear fission). There is a need to balance the near term investments and immediate reductions of atmospheric carbon emissions with the opportunity cost of long term improvements.

Going out and investing all public funds into constructing hundreds of nuclear plants right now which may be online in five to ten years, while increasing the atmospheric carbon output at the time we should be looking for ways to mitigate it is not as sensible as investing in some near term reduced carbon and cost effective pollution mitigation and carbon sequestration for fossil fuel production. And realistically, even if we could build enough nuclear facilities to totally replace fossil fuels and bring them all online in the span of a few years, the fiscal and vocational effects would still have to be addressed versus a more measured phase out and replacement. The notion that we’re just going to come in one day and shut down all fossil fuel generation plants is about as practicable as Bernie Sanders claiming that he’s going to just “break up the big banks”; implemented bluntly would make a solution worse than the problem.

We’re going to have fossil fuels as some part of our energy portfolio for the near future, and that is most certainly true of developing nations that can’t afford to purchase or indigenously develop nuclear fission power production capability. There needs to be a practical path, including the use of synthetic hydrocarbons or biofuels for transportation, and renewables for supplementary power production, especially in regions where access to renewable resources is favorable and the low cost bar to installation makes them more practical versus having to stand up a large infrastructure project for distribution. Nuclear fission, hybrid fission-fusion, and ultimately pure fusion are significant and likely even majority components, but they are not an panacea or end-all to providing power production needs.

Stranger

76

By building larger factories. The SolarCity Gigafactory claims to produce 1 gigawatt worth of solar panels in a year. That’s roughly equivalent to producing one nuclear power station a year. So if we spend $7.5 billion and build 10 factories of this size, they can crank out enough solar panels to equal 100 nuclear power stations. Maybe it’s my inexperience, but I don’t see how this is obviously more difficult than building 100 nuclear reactors.

77

Well, we’d need nearly a thousand years at the production of 1 gigawatts worth of solar panels a year to replace everything in the US. The biggest issue, though, are the rare earth metals used in solar panels (I assume we are talking solar voltaic cells btw).

I have a SolarCity system on my house, btw, and love it. They have a great program where they pay the up front capital costs and you pay them for your electric bill, and you can buy it out in 7 years if you like (I am paying on average a hundred dollars less in electric bills a month, and some months its over $200 less). It’s a hell of a lot better than the old system I pretty much built for myself (and less dangerous than my old battery system I cobbled together :p). I’m really hoping they bring out the new roof tile system soon…that’s going to be my own next phase, along with 2 of the Tesla wall units I’ve been reading about.

78

Hmm, did I drop a factor of 10 somewhere? Still, something like 30 factories * 35 years sounds doable to me.

Are those rare earths more difficult to mine and refine than uranium? And didn’t we hear exactly the same thing when hybrid cars started to appear? (Electric motors use rare earth magnets)

79

The cost and effort of producing the solar panels is only one aspect of the total cost of developing sufficient solar power generation capability, which includes having to acquire appropriate land (by purchase or eminent domain), install the panels and management systems, a power storage system to support time and seasonal based demand for peak power availability. And this is notwithstanding that several areas of the country are manifestly unsuited for solar power generation (e.g. the Pacific Northwest, Alaska Great Lakes, upper New England) where average cloud cover is high enough that power generation is unreliable or untenable, which would mandate distributing energy from suitable regions (e.g. the Southwest, Eastern Gulf Coast) to ones that cannot natively support solar power, which would require rebuilding the electrical distribution grid to handle such throughput reliably and robustly. (Given the state of the grid, the that is actually desirable regardless, but it is a signficant cost on the order of tens of billions of dollars to upgrade, especially for long distance HVDC transmission.)

Solar is still probably more cost effective than current Generation III nuclear on a dollar per kWh produced basis, but it is questionable that it would be sufficiently robust to be a single solution even for just electrical power needs, notwithstanding that one aspect of climate change is increases in storm and cloud cover which could negatively impact the level of power that could be consistently produced by such a system. Taking the simplistic approach of just comparing one aspect of cost to the total system cost of another method of production is not an apples-to-apples comparison, nor is ignoring the other considerations besides just the estimated cost.

Stranger

80

And now that we all have hybrid cars nobody talks about it? Lol. I don’t know about the specifics of the actual mining but sourcing uranium is definitely less difficult, in the sense that most of the big producers are long time US allies and the U.S. itself. Rare earth material is almost all China.