By those standards, it’s not a wind or solar or hydro thread either. You feel perfectly free to offer up wind and solar (though not, oddly, hydro) as alternatives to nuclear power, yet completely ignore the simple fact that if nuclear power were outlawed tomorrow it would be coal that would take up the slack for at least 20 years.
[QUOTE=The Second Stone]
Why it is so hard for you to grasp that people can and will build 100k plus 15MW turbines for offshore (and some onshore) use over the next century?
[/QUOTE]
Considering that the 1.5-2.5 MW turbines cost $1-2 million, what does a 15 MW turbine cost? I notice you just tossed this in as if 15 MW turbines are common, every day things…instead of huge monster turbines that aren’t in wide use today.
Do you have a cite showing that 15 MW turbines cost ‘up to 10 million a pop’? Because that seems a bit low to me, even if we aren’t talking about the installation and building out of the infrastructure. Which, of course, we WOULD have to talk about, if we were looking at this seriously. But I notice a lack of hard numbers when talking to folks like you…just vague handwavage about how we can simply build the things in the quantities we need, and that they probably don’t cost all that much…
It is. Wind is a real energy source, no one denies that. What you don’t seem capable of grasping is that wind is not going to be anything but a niche source because you simply can’t build it on the scales needed to be a major energy generator. You can’t build hundreds of thousands of the things, no on any realistic time frame. Maybe we’ll have hundreds of thousands of them deployed in a century, but we won’t have them in a decade, or even 2 or 3 decades. Think about how many are in production today in the US, which is the number 1 or number 2 generator of wind power in the world. Then consider that we aren’t talking about 2 times or 5 times that number, but an order of magnitude more than are currently in production. Costing hundreds of billions of dollars and taking huge resources to produce.
Dude…take the wax out of your ears or the shit you are using for brains out of your head. I’ve said, repeatedly, that I DON’T think we’ll be building any new nuclear power plants in the US. WHICH PART OF THAT STATEMENT ARE YOU TOO FUCKING STUPID TO UNDERSTAND? Which part are you unable to grasp the meaning of? Let me say it again, in the vain hope that it will penetrate your thick skull…I DON’T THINK THAT THE US WILL BE BUILDING ANY NEW NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS! Here, let me continue: I THINK THAT NUCLEAR POWER IN THE US IS A DYING POWER SOURCE, AND THAT IN THE FUTURE WILL ONLY CONTINUE TO DECLINE!
Do you get it? It’s idiots like you and your chums in this thread who have made it so. You’ve won! Ignorance and fear prevails! WO-fucking-HOO! Now you all will have to live with the reality…a reality where wind and solar are just niche players, will continue to be niche players, and were the majority of our energy will continue to come from fossil fuels now and in the future. You will continue to handwave the costs of wind and solar, and continue to think it’s some sort of vast conspiracy as to why wind and solar only make up a small fraction of our total electrical power generation. And as we lose that 20% from nuclear in the next decade or so, and as our need for electricity continues to increase, and as countries like China and India continue to put out larger and larger CO2 footprints that we are unable to balance, you’ll be scratching your heads and picking your asses as to what happened…why is the CO2 continuing to go up?? We have 15 MW wind turbines and 60-70 MW solar plants!! It would be funny, if it wasn’t so fucking sad…
-XT
Meh, by the time nuke gets around to building ten new plants we’ll have 1500MW turbines that can easily be seen from space. That will be cool!
Have you always been a stupid shit? Because I really have never gotten the full-retard vibe from you before?
It was a joke!
Oh Em Geee!
Yeah, but with the The Second Stone, FXMastermind and Gonzo posting with you, subtle humor might get lost.
Not on the intelligent. Subtlety is only lost on the dense.
You know what else is really dense? Uranium. Even depleted uranium.
Nevermind the cost. (Well it counts but there are other issues…see below.)
Where will you put them?
The bigger a wind turbine is the more wind it needs (I hope this is obvious). I suppose you could make ever bigger blades but guessing they are already at the limits of those else they would do it (i.e. I am guessing they match the most efficient blade to the generator).
The GE 2.5 MW turbine (PDF) needs a wind speed of 28 MPH to achieve that. Below that speed the power generation drops off precipitously (look at their brochure…this is their own numbers).
Know a lot of places in the US with a sustained wind speed of over 28 MPH?
Oh, I agree Whack-a-Mole…there are so many issues that it’s hard to just stay focused on one when wind or solar is concerned. I focused on cost because TSS was pulling that $10 million for a 15 MW turbine out of his ass…and then making like 15 MW turbines were common or something. That’s because if you pretend that 1.5 MW turbines are actually 15 MW turbines (in all things…cost, deployment, wind as you noted, etc) then you need a lot fewer of the things to get to the target numbers the wind folks are looking at (generally getting it up over 10% of our total electrical generation…maybe even shooting for the Holy Grain of knocking off what nuclear can do at 20%). I think that even the most fervent starts to get the idea when you start talking about needed hundreds of thousands of wind turbines, and you start associating a cost for each one in the millions of dollars. Which, I figure, is why in so many of these discussions the advocates of wind and solar never want to actually look at the hard numbers, or talk about the resources (or the time) it would take to make it work (or the nagging little problems, such as what you do if the wind ISN’T blowing steadily at the optimal level).
-XT
Alternative-Energy-News.info domain is for sale | Buy with Epik.com Here is a site that sends me a lot of emails describing the changes in energy production around the world. There is an article saying the Empire State Bldg. will be soon run on 100 percent wind energy.
You keep envisioning the coal plant and nuke plant model. You do not need to have all the power production in one huge spot and directed to communities. Those are obsolete visions.
You will note a lot of places are working hard to get off fossil fuels are are successful .
Dragging your heels about nuclear energy is counterproductive.
When you factor cost of nuke plants, how much do you assess for a reactor accident? There are 7 tons of highly radioactive water pouring into the sea per hour. What will that do to the fish and plant life? How much do you factor in for a dead strip of land in Japan/ Are you adding up the costs of the energy fighting the reactor meltdowns?
The Japanese government is nationalizing the energy company to keep the it from going from going bankrupt.
You can not just pour cement on these reactors either. They are leaking from the bottom. This will be an extremely expensive fix that will take years. You still have lots of hot fuel rods to deal with. This is a monumentally expensive problem.
If a blade falls off a wind mill, the community will not be destroyed.
Here is the world’s current largest wind turbine. It is rated at 7MW and has a rotor diameter of 128 meters (413 feet…longer than a football field). Look at the cranes next to it to get an idea of its size.
The Spanish are apparently working on a 15MW turbine for offshore use but they do not expect it to be ready till 2020. No idea what it will look like but if the other one is anything to go by imagine something twice as big.
$10 million each? No way. I have no idea how much that’d cost but $10 million seems laughably cheap. Thing will be a monster.
It has been pointed out…repeatedly…that wind/solar power can come nowhere near meeting the nation’s power needs. At least not remotely economically.
You are left with fossil fuel and nuclear.
Compared to coal nuclear is downright clean.
^[1](Kingston Fossil Plant coal fly ash slurry spill - Wikipedia) by the way causing lots of damage and necessitating huge cleanup costs.
Those things spill ↩︎
[QUOTE=gonzomax]
http://www.alternative-energy-news.i…ment-wildlife/ Here is a site that sends me a lot of emails describing the changes in energy production around the world. There is an article saying the Empire State Bldg. will be soon run on 100 percent wind energy.
You keep envisioning the coal plant and nuke plant model. You do not need to have all the power production in one huge spot and directed to communities. Those are obsolete visions.
You will note a lot of places are working hard to get off fossil fuels are are successful .
[/QUOTE]
I couldn’t get your link to fully load…just the banner portions. It didn’t seem to be exactly an unbiased site there, but I’ll leave it to someone who can get it to load and read the article to see if it actually says what you say, and what it means. Personally, if the Empire State Building can get 100% of it’s energy in a cost effective way from wind power alone, then that’s great…more power to them, so to speak.
We derive 20% of our electrical production from nuclear. No matter what fantasies you have, that simply can’t be replaced overnight. So, dragging heals is just reality.
As for the other, they are trying to fix that leak as quickly as possible. One of the things that they are doing is deliberately releasing lower contaminated water into the ocean so that they can use the storage for the higher contaminated water.
And yeah, it’s energy intensive. So is the cleanup of the non-nuclear aspects from this disaster. Stuff like this doesn’t happen ever day, though, so you have to average it out with all the 40 years before this where the plant ran without major problems on the scales of what’s happening right now.
Will it cost more than the cleanup for the other aspects of the earthquake and tsunami?? :dubious: The disaster itself, including the nuclear aspects, will be ‘monumentally expensive’, and will cost the Japanese hundreds of billions of dollars, US, and will take years to set right. No one doubts that or denies it.
And if the blades fall off several hundred or several thousands wind mills? And if you rely on those wind mills for a large percentage of your power? Storms happen, and nothing designed to spin around like these is going to be immune from a really big storm, or from other disasters. How long would it take to clean up and get back into production a large wind farm hit by a level 4 or 5 hurricane, or a tornado on land? If the Empire State Building goes with 100% wind power for their energy needs, what happens if there is a storm large enough, or some other disaster strikes that takes out 20% of their capacity? Or 50%?
-XT
I don’t have a cite, but I think I read somewhere that the first one could cost as much as $60-70 million, but that price will drop significantly when production increases. That’s the way it is with most things, isn’t it?
The nuclear industry has spent how many billions over 65 years perfecting breeder reactors? There’s only one working on the whole planet (commercially) in Russia, and it doesn’t even use plutonium yet.
The first one, is always going to be hella expensive.
[QUOTE=levdrakon]
I don’t have a cite, but I think I read somewhere that the first one could cost as much as $60-70 million, but that price will drop significantly when production increases. That’s the way it is with most things, isn’t it?
[/QUOTE]
Sure…economies of scale and all that. But it’s not going to drop to $10 million…the materials alone are going to cost that much. As Whack-a-Mole says and as I mentioned earlier, the things would be monsters. Hell, the ones built today are monsters, if you’ve ever seen one up close.
Yeah…the first successful ones were build in the 50’s. One would have to ask the question as to WHY, when the technology obviously works, that more haven’t been built. Any ideas?
That’s true. But unless you think that the raw materials being used in the thing will somehow become so abundant as to drop the costs dramatically, there is a base level where you just can’t go below, no matter how much automation you put into the process. Also, I’d need to see a cite, because that $60-70 million (or was it Euros?) might have have just been the costs to the company, and there might have been an equal buy in from interested governments and grants and such. The devil is in the details.
-XT
Strange arguments. I do not recall saying we could replace nuclear overnight. I know we are stuck with the plants we have. I would suggest we fade them deliberately and steadily.
We have to put our money and technology in alternative forms of energy. We do not need to stress yesterdays energy sources, coal and nuclear. They are clearly not the answer.
XT claims my sources are biased? Why? Because they push new energy forms over the old? Therefore all XTs sources are biased. Because they defend ,very poorly, nuclear .We can no longer have cites. They all have to have some kind of slant.
About the leak. they are dumping 7 tons of radioactive water, 10,000 times over normal plant levels in the ocean PER HOUR. I feel glad they are working so hard to stop it. It makes every body feel so much better.
Sweet! Looks like the powers that be in Japan have opted to dump 11,500 tons of radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean.
That’s roughly 3,000,000 gallons of radioactive water.
Take that, you pussified anti-nuclear whackjobs!
http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/04/04/japan.nuclear.reactors/index.html?hpt=T2
[QUOTE=gonzomax]
Strange arguments. I do not recall saying we could replace nuclear overnight.
[/QUOTE]
You said this:
That seems to imply that nuclear power advocates are keeping you from decommissioning all of those nasty nuclear plants and replacing them with…well, coal or natural gass, since today those are the only choices to get the kind of scale we are talking about. That’s what I was responding too, anyway.
That’s happening already. New nuclear plants aren’t being built in the US, and I seriously doubt they will be in the future. So, as they reach the end of their shelf life they will either get extensions or they will be decommissioned, and coal plants will have to be built to replace them. Perhaps smaller coal plants can be built, since wind and solar will take up a few percentage points of the loss.
You keep saying this as if it’s meaningful, but it’s not. Steam power technology is centuries old now, yet it’s still the primary source for the vast majority of our electrical energy generation (it’s even used in types of solar plants). It’s not going away, and it’s not getting replaced.
Actually, I said the page wouldn’t load for me, but that the banners seemed pretty biased…because they do. All my sources are biased though? (note: who are you talking too? Your anti-nuke buddeies? It’s pretty funny for you to mention me in the third person all the time). The IAEA has been the primary cite I’ve used in these discussions.
Again, you have to look at the actual risks involved. It SOUNDS scary (which is why you and the other anti-nukes have and will harp on it), but from what I was reading earlier the stuff they are deliberately dumping will raise the average dosage for anyone swimming around or eating the seafood from immediately around the plant by less than 1 mSv/hour. The high level stuff that’s leaking is MUCH more of a concern, but even there a lot of it has relatively short half-lives, so the problem is self limiting. Of the longer half-life contamination, well, that’s more of a concern, no doubt. But, again, you have to assess the risk from a realistic and non-fear based/non-chicken-little-esque basis.
-XT