Yep. A lot less than it would cost for even one reactor to blow it’s load of radioactive fuel into the ecosystem of a country.
If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
The fact is that electricity needs to be transferred using power lines, which not only cause a loss in power over long distances, but actually have to be built across miles of land in order to get the electricity from those remote, empty places where the wind is to the non-remote, person-filled places that need the power.
It’s completely pointless to essentially dismiss the problem of location and transmission, as you appear to be doing. Your attitude seems to be “Just build the turbines and we’ll find a way to get all that power where it needs to go.”
Actually my response is to put solar and wind on top of every building. This eliminates the expense and loss due to big old transmission lines. Sure the sun doesn’t shine all the time, nor the wind blow, but every little bit helps.
The problem isn’t that we need all these big power plants for everyday people or use. It’s the peak load that is the problem. And big business needs.
And when a disaster takes out the plant, or the lines, everybody has no power. But hey man, this isn’t the thread for solving the worlds power problem.
Sure, and your car probably has a top speed you rarely exceed. I don’t think 7.5, 10, or 20MW turbines are going to be installed places where the owners aren’t pretty sure what the wind is going to be like. Of course, nuclear scientists thought the biggest earthquake was a 6, and the tallest tsunami was what, a meter or two? So who knows.
It’s the same thing with nuke really. You can’t cram a 1000MW nuke plant into a 100MW grid. Ain’t happening, especially not on a global scale. As you say, you can pick the right turbine for the application. That’s not so easy with a 1000MW nuke plant.
Texas wind power has already set a record for generating 25% of the state’s power on a good day.
Spain wind power has already set a record for generating over 50% of its electricity on a good day.
Here’s a nice little CBS documentary about the Texas wind industry. It’s completely revitalized the economies and lives of the people who live near turbines.
Considering the industry doubled its power output just over the last three years, I have to say we kinda are already building them all over. The problem now is running enough transmission lines to move that energy, and that’s something states are already doing.
Plus, manufacturing turbines isn’t instant. We already make over 50,000,000 cars/year though, so we aren’t talking about something ridiculous like building 500 more nuclear power plants, just in the US. Now that’s crazy.
Will we run out of all the best spots eventually? Maybe, but turbines have a lifespan of about 20 years, so every twenty years or so existing turbines get replaced with the latest technology. Nuke plants don’t even get finished for 10 or more years, then they’re stuck with the exact same technology for the next 50 years, if they don’t get shut down and decommissioned much sooner, at great expense.
Which reminds me, when a wind turbine goes bad, the cows can keep grazing, and the fish can keep swimming. Not so much with nuke plants.
You act like this is all a mystery. Who knows? Well, the Dept. of Energy knows, and I’ve been linking to their wind maps, which show NO areas of significant size on the continent that have sustained winds high enough for those big turbines. So you need smaller ones. But in wind power generation smaller is not better - you’d rather have 100 7MW turbines than 1000 700KW turbines. Less maintenance, less area, less raw materials, etc. As you scale the size of the turbines down, the cost goes up.
Who said anything about nuclear plants having to be 1000MW? Nuclear plants can be much smaller.
These power plants are very interesting. They’re the size of a hot tub, and generate 25MW of power. They’re sealed units, and can’t melt down because they don’t have to be actively cooled. You bury them in the ground, and run water through them. The water is turned into steam, which powers turbines.
These mini reactors are sealed and buried. No waste has to be removed from them. The company comes in and buries it in the ground, and for ten years you get enough power for 20,000 homes. At the end of ten years when the fuel is expended, the company comes out, digs up the reactor, puts in a new one, and takes the old one away for refueling and reuse somewhere else. Hundreds of these are on order, and they promise to revolutionize power in places that don’t have good power grids. A community can get together, raise their own capital, buy their own nuke plant, and they’re now completely power self-sufficient.
That’s the kind of technology that can really be a game-changer - especially in developing countries. But there’s no reason it couldn’t be used for electrical power everywhere. They also would be very useful for commercial activity, such as replacing natural gas for steam reformation of oil sands, cutting the carbon footprint in half.
A misleading figure. The actual percentage of contribution to Texas’s annual power needs is currently about 8.7%. That’s nothing to sniff, and I think it’s great, but Texas has a lot of natural advantages for wind that other states don’t have. In addition, Texas has very high electricity costs because it gets most of its electricity from natural gas, so wind is more competitive.
In addition, Texas is subsidizing wind power and transmission line construction. The transmission lines alone are going to be paid for by a $4/mo tax on all residents.
Even with all that, Texas is unlikely to see more than 20% of their total power needs met by wind.
This is a specious argument. I keep hearing alternative energy folks talking about how many jobs these projects create, as if the money for them was coming out of thin air. Of course any industrial project creates jobs in its area. But the money used costs jobs elsewhere. The bottom line is that if your energy costs go up, the cost of making and using things goes up, and this ultimately has a negative effect on the economy.
As I said before, they’re picking the low-hanging fruit right now. That’s good, but there’s only so much of it. Wind power doesn’t scale because once that low-hanging fruit is gone, the economics fall apart. You’re dealing with cube-law problems here - half the wind means 1/8 the energy. So once you run out of good wind locations, the cost of wind power starts to go up exponentially.
Wind turbines use a lot of raw material. Copper for generator windings in particular may be problematic at the kind of scale you’re talking about. Copper is already go up in price rapidly.
So what? You act like that’s a feature. But the wind only has so much energy in it, and turbines are already very efficient. There isn’t a lot of technological help we can expect in the next 20 years in turbine construction. We’re pretty good at building generators. We might extract a few more percentage points of efficiency, but there’s no quantum leap in wind power waiting for the right technology.
So a nuclear plant has a lifespan of 50 years, and a wind turbine has a lifespan of 20 years, and you treat this like it’s a good thing?
It’s called breeder reactors, and if it wouldn’t be for emotional, non-fact based rejection to the technology they could indeed eat most of the radioactive nuclear fuel waste from outdated nuclear plants.
A normal reactor uses up to about 1% of the Uranium in the fuel and produces large amounts of nuclear waste which requires tens of thousands of years of safe storage , a breeder reactor uses up to 99.5% of it and almost all the waste winds down to the same amount of radioactivity as the natural ores in 100 or 200 years.
The tragedy on all this is that we actually have the technology for safe and plentiful energy. I used to be against nuclear energy, I scoffed at those early PR phrases, like nuclear power would bring peace to the world. Over the years I realized that was actually true, the one thing that keeps the world going is energy, think of all the conflicts and misery caused over the control of oil for example. Search and securing energy sources is the top priority of the human race if you look at the overall picture, energy for farming, industry, everyday life, energy, energy and energy is what it is. Prices of foodstuffs, transportation, communication, manufacturing, etc, etc, etc… It’s the energy, stupid.
And here we are, with the technology to fuel our energy needs for a billion years, without CO2 emissions and manageable waste production, and we sit on it. It is to cry.
It is as if we were stuck with Victorian era steam engines, progress that would improve safety and efficiency is stiffed over hysterical fear mongering; its counter productive and a self fulfilling prophesy. Nuclear power is bad because (among other things) the large amounts of high level waste produced, yet the technology to deal with it is prevented to be implemented.
Last I heard India is working on building breeder reactors, watch out for them to have an economic boom because of them.
JAPAN HAS A BREEDER REACTOR!
Learn to use Wikipedia and avoid being dumb.
I would be slightly upset about the ad hominem, but since it comes from a confessed troll I guess is par for the course.
One day wind and solar will be so abundant that it won’t pay to meter them.
And everyone will have a magic pony in every pot…and since it will be magical, no one will meter OR yard it either! Some day, over the rainbow…
-XT
15 MW capacity being developed in Spain. http://inhabitat.com/spain-to-build-worlds-largest-wind-turbine/ It is for offshore. 70 percent of the world’s real estate is offshore.
[QUOTE=FXMastermind]
Actually my response is to put solar and wind on top of every building. This eliminates the expense and loss due to big old transmission lines. Sure the sun doesn’t shine all the time, nor the wind blow, but every little bit helps.
[/QUOTE]
Will it be free? If not, what do you suppose it will cost to put solar and wind on every building? And how much energy do you suppose this will generate? What would be our collective ROI for putting solar and wind on every building, and whats the goal? To add a little bit to help? Eliminate conventional power generation? Go boldly where no ferret has gone before?
Seriously…what the fuck are you talking about? Everyday people don’t use energy during peak times? Why do you suppose there ARE peak times? Is it simply because Big Business™ gobbles it all up when no one is looking??
Which has happened exactly once in the history of nuclear power. So…I’m guessing that you got out your handy dandy calculator and crunched the numbers, and now want to change the subject. Of course, if you go out and get the figures for how many buildings there are in the US, and then calculate what it would cost to put solar and wind on ‘every building’, that’s going to be even worse than the 500k wind generators (using numbers that are probably way low…I’m guessing that if you actually tried to build 500k wind generators the actual costs would be a lot more than $1-2 million a pop, and of course none of this includes the cost of building the infrastructure to get the power back to the grid…or the myriad other costs, such as what it would take to maintain half a million wind generators).
See, that’s the thing. When you start actually looking at what it would take just to catch wind and/or solar up to where nuclear (or even hydro) is today it just doesn’t work. It would take a huge amount of capital, and that assumes that even pouring money into it we could actually build the things on that sort of scale…which I highly doubt. Or that there is actually viable places to put them all…which, again, I doubt.
The choice is going to come down to whether we keep the status quo and continue to use coal fired plants for the bulk of our energy, while building up wind and solar to, perhaps someday get to 10% of our energy production while letting nuclear languish and eventually die, or whether we are serious about cutting our CO2 in this country. The status quo will work…coal fired plants can certainly produce the energy we need, when augmented with the current mix of energy producing sources. As nuclear slowly dies, wind and solar will probably continue to rise to fill some of the void…and for all that it can’t fill I guess we can build more coal or natural gas plants. They will be cleaner than those being churned out in China or India at least, which should be some consolation I guess.
-XT
Speaking of breeder reactors, Germany has one. It includes a hotel with 400 beds! If you watch this video, you can see the plant in operation. It’s pretty cool.
I wasn’t talking to you, but to all the idiots who keep saying there are NO breeder reactors. Japan is operating one right now.
Which if anyone actually cared about the facts they would know. It’s not that somebody is ignorant, it is that they remain that way, insist upon not knowing, which is your right of course, but I’m going to call you stupid if you keep doing it.
No not really. Arguing with stupid people is a waste of time.
Meanwhile, even the media is starting to realize they are being duped.
[QUOTE=The Second Stone]
15 MW capacity being developed in Spain. http://inhabitat.com/spain-to-build-…-wind-turbine/ It is for offshore. 70 percent of the world’s real estate is offshore.
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Is it so cheap that the Spanish don’t ever have to meter their energy use?
So…reading the cite, this one generator cost $33 million dollars to build (they don’t say if that’s just for the generator or if that includes the cost of infrastructure). IIRC, 10-15MWh is enough energy for 10-15k homes. So, to power a city of a million you’d need…? And that would cost…?
(and, as Sam says, that 10-15 MW doesn’t mean you get that all the time…you get that when it’s running optimally. And what’s the maintenance costs of something this big that’s deployed offshore? I’d think it would be quite a bit higher than onshore generators, no?)
-XT
Here’s the thing, it hasn’t happened only once. Radiation spewing from reactors all over the countryside has happened more than once. Hanford, Windscale, Chernobyl and Fukushima. That’s not county Idaho and TMI which won’t admit releasing radiation, but probably did. Here is a rather extensive list of bad stuff the US has had to deal with. U.S. Nuclear Accidents
That doesn’t include other countries or incidents in the US successfully covered up. It’s dozens.
The argument that wind has to replace all the coal plants by itself is dishonest. Wind is part of the solution. Solar is another.
A wave energy power generator is being built in the Detroit River. Who knows how that will work out ? But there will be new forms of energy production being developed on a continuing basis.
Several times today ,they said on TV that 40 percent of the energy used in the average home is wasted. A college is developing a home monitoring unit that reads energy use at every outlet in the home and shuts it down when not in use. Conservation is an important factor in modifying our energy usage.
Several European countries get a lot of power from wind and solar. we can do a lot better using those technologies. But the Luddites are wedding to older technologies like coal and nuclear. They are dirty and dangerous.
France gets 70% of their electricity from nuclear. They haven’t had any problems. No one is being irradiated, the population is safe and a lot healthier than they’d have been had France been burning coal instead.
France doesn’t have a huge nuclear waste problem, because they reprocess and consume their own spent fuel. As a result, the waste created for all the energy needs of a family of four for twenty years could fit into a space the size of a test tube.
The only reason the U.S. doesn’t reprocess fuel is because Jimmy Carter signed an executive order banning the reprocessing of nuclear fuel at the height of popular anti-nuclear hysteria in the U.S. As a result, perfectly good reactor fuel is left sitting in cooling ponds and on-site storage indefinitely because the same anti-nuclear hysterics have managed to shut down every reasonable attempt to store the waste properly. But if reprocessing of fuel was done, you won’t need such a huge storage facility, and you wouldn’t have to worry about finding sites with 100,000 year geologic stability, because the left over waste from reprocessing is as safe as the ore the uranium was mined from within a few hundred years.
I get really tired of people with no understanding of engineering proposing idiotic plans like putting windmills on the roofs of all the buildings in America. Do you have ANY idea what kind of loads a windmill of any reasonably capacity would put on the roof of a building? Jesus. In addition, wind turbines vibrate, transmitting sound and energy to the structure below. Also, the air around buildings is turbulent and unusable. So you’d still have to put the turbine on a tower, making the whole thing totally impractical.
There have been a few very small turbines mounted experimentally on buildings (by ‘very small’ I mean not enough power to supply the needs of the building below it, let alone anyone else), and in every case I know if, the project was a failure.
In addition, the collapse of a large turbine in a residential area would be disastrous, the noise would be unacceptable, and the number of people killed from falls while trying to maintain these things would probably be in the thousands per year.
Throwing out ‘cool’ ideas may work in a dorm room bull session with other liberal arts majors, but if you try to translate that ‘cool’ idea into policy, you’ll just kill people and hurt the economy. That’s the problem with pie-in-the-sky - it doesn’t work, so by insisting on it you prevent real improvements from being made in the energy infrastructure and the status quo wins.
Don’t you anti-nuke types believe in global warming? Isn’t it our most pressing problem? If so, how do you justify allowing coal and gas and oil to continue providing power for the next fifty years, while you try to ramp up your miracle energy sources?
Even the Department of Energy’s wildly optimistic scenario for wind power only says that America could be getting 20% of its power from wind by 2030. Of course, by 2030 America will probably need a hell of a lot more than 20% more power, so the amount of CO2 being emitted won’t even go down. Is that okay with you? Do you think nuclear waste is a bigger worry than global warming?
Nothing of any consequence. A lot of these energy technologies will never be anything more than niche products for unique applications. They’ll never amount to a significant percentage of America’s energy generation.
Households only make up something like 20% of the energy used in America. That energy includes appliances, heating water, heat and air conditioning for the home, etc. And the dirty little fact is that home electrical use is increasing, because we’re buying more and more electrical devices. Big screen TV’s, computers, etc. You may wish it wasn’t so, but it’s what people want. That’s not going to change in a major way unless you become dictator.
Oh, nice - trying to claim that advocates of new nuclear plants are ‘luddites’, while the people who oppose them aren’t. Good try.
Yes, some countries get a lot of energy from wind. They are small coastal countries with excellent wind availability in relation to the population. Good for them. Likewise, Iceland gets a lot of its power from geothermal energy, but that doesn’t make it a solution for America.
As for solar in Europe - that’s looking more and more like a failed experiment. Spain’s heavy investment in alternative energy helped bankrupt them, and once the subsidies from the government stopped, those industries have collapsed. Germany’s heavy subsidy of solar power resulted in a lot of marginal installations, unfulfilled promises for energy savings, high taxes, and a lot of solar panels on roofs whose owners won’t be able afford maintenance or replacement.
Germany’s feed-in tariff to subsidize its solar power program is a billion Euros a month, paid for by German taxpayers. That 12 billion Euros per year gets them 1% of their energy, which is all solar provides in Germany. And Germany is the undisputed leader in solar power in Europe.
By the way, the Fukashima plant complex alone generates more electricity than all of Germany’s solar plants combined. Germany has paid almost $100 billion for that capacity. A nuclear power plant runs about $4 billion.
The government didn’t bail them out with a couple tril? That’s not very American of them.