I’ve never said wind alone should power everything. That’s a straw man the anti-renewable crowd keeps trying to pin on me.
The more sources of power interconnected in a smart grid, the safer, cheaper and more secure our energy supply is. Concentrating 80% of a region’s power supply in one nuke plant is a disaster waiting to happen. They do happen.
It was an irrigation dam. Eight missing, Four dead.
Quoth Levdrakon:
No, it does not equate to thousands of dollars per month. That’s the price for the entire common-area usage, and what you would save if you had a system that always met that need. Wind, as that article admitted, is not such a system. How often, in that location, does the wind blow at full strength? The article doesn’t say, and without that information, we can’t know how much they save per month.
Personally, I prefer a long extension cord for my power tools.
If Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island, Windscale and Idaho are acceptable risks in health, lives, financially and environmentally, then nuclear power is the bees knees. Personally, I don’t like bees.
What we do know, is that according to the owner, it’s saving tens of thousands of dollars in electricity over the course of a year. It must then be a fact that the wind system on that building produces tens of thousands of dollars worth of power. That it has days with less wind and days with more wind is all part of the technology.
Similarly, nuke plants have days, weeks, years, when they are offline. That’s a bit like when the wind blows, and then sometimes doesn’t. It’s all part of the technology. You can’t expect a nuke plant to run continuously anymore than you can expect a wind turbine to run at capacity all the time.
You’ll have to take that up with the owner/builder. The entire building was conceived and designed as a green experiment in lower-income, urban living and how well people adapt to living in a green building. The project probably has all kinds of different funding, discounts, etc.
It’s been over a year now and the owner said he’d publish results right around now, but I haven’t seen anything.
[QUOTE=levdrakon]
What we do know, is that according to the owner, it’s saving tens of thousands of dollars in electricity over the course of a year. It must then be a fact that the wind system on that building produces tens of thousands of dollars worth of power. That it has days with less wind and days with more wind is all part of the technology.
[/QUOTE]
No…what we know from that article is that the company claims it could save approx. $10,000 a year…and that the system costs $100,000 dollars to implement. As I said earlier, that means that even if they are right in their optimistic assessment of what it could/would/will save, you are looking at a 10 year ROI (if there are zero additional costs).
-XT
It depends on how you define the ROI. Apparently, the “tens of thousands” a year they save is being used for counseling and job training. Assuming it isn’t all a big scam, it would be hard to calculate the true value of 10 years of counseling, job training and whatever else they do with the money. It’s money in their pocket, throughout the ten years, they can use, instead of paying it to Big Power.
Actually, It has been a year and a half.
http://wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?t=5081&page=20
You can actually see the wind turbines on google maps.
Now that I look at the arrangement more closely, it looks like whoever set it up either didn’t know how to set up wind turbines or didn’t care how how much power they generated. Having all the wind turbines in a row means that they can only work at maximum efficiency if the wind is blowing at right angles. From the East or West the turbines interfere with each other. I would reduce my guess to $2,000 per year for the electricity generated by the wind turbines. They are probably saving a lot more than that from using high efficiency windows.
I assume you just made that all up, unless you can cite it.
I would be forced to agree with davekhps (and xtisme who appears not to realize they are argreeing with davekhps) that humans are poor at risk evaluation, and that this makes public policy very difficult, particularly in a democracy where even wise leaders (if they exist) who contradict the biases of the people can be voted out of power.
However, that factor may have been made even worse by pro-nuclear people losing credibility, in large part through being perceived as having promised more safety than was delivered. The sensible arguments for well regulated nuclear power all have to account for relative risks without perfect safely. Selling it as nearly perfectly safe has backfired. Too many people feel they’ve been lied to before and distrust any pro-nuclear PR. I don’t totally blame many people for that.
HOWEVER, there are good points for Nuclear Energy which need to be made. One of the largest is CO2 and climate change. Alas, that gets confused by political polarization, as the “human caused climate change is a fraud” meme is making large inroads into some of the folks who are least resistant to nuclear. Weighting of risks is not the only irrationality among humans.
It would be good if thorium reactors became commercially feasible; it would help to be able to convince people by truthfully explaining that we are building substantually safer reactors.
But it’s still always going to come down to relative risks, rather than perfect safety. And since people have so much trouble grasping that, there is a need to rebuild trust in “the authorities” who promote nuclear, but not being perceived as underplaying the real risks. People need to feel their concerns (even ones we may consider not fully rational) have been heard and taken into account, rather than being ridiculed and summarily discounted (approaches I see often among nuclear advocates, alas).
Fighting ignorance successfully seems to require a certain degree of rapport building skills, not just “being right” (in our own minds) - the latter is way too common already.
Nuclear would never happen without the underwriting and subsidies of governments. If the US gov’t didn’t insure GE, they would NEVER build another plant.
“A handful of studies have quantified subsidies to the nuclear-power industry over the decades, indicating aggregate subsidization at well over US$ 150 billion, and a subsidy intensity (government support per kWh output) normally exceeding 30% of the market value of the energy produced.”
This whole discussion seems to have devolved into a coal vs. nuclear argument. How about they both suck? If we put the gov’t subsidies into wind and solar we would be less interested in the dictator du jour in the mideast and in tearing mountains down to get at the coal to burn and pollute our environment so everyone can watch the apprentice on their 80 inch HD tv with TIVO…
Oh wait, then the Koch Brothers wouldn’t be so rich. Sorry my bad. :smack:
I wish Cecil had answered the part of the question that said “Wind emits three times the amount of greenhouse gases that nuclear power does. Decommissioning a wind-power site is as least as expensive as decommissioning a nuclear plant and disposing of the waste.”
I’d guess that both of those statements are false. Correct ?
[QUOTE=Bill Dietrich]
I’d guess that both of those statements are false. Correct ?
[/QUOTE]
It probably depends on what you are looking at. I’m not sure exactly what he’s basing his assertion that wind power plants emit 3x more green house gas than a nuclear power plant does, but perhaps he’s talking about during the construction, or perhaps he’s talking about during the maintenance. Wind farms are highly distributed, and if things go wrong you are going to have to send some guy in a car, truck or boat out to fix it. On a large wind farm I imagine this could add up, especially for the offshore plants.
As for decommissioning, do a thought experiment…what would it cost to decommission a large wind farm at sea? You couldn’t simply let it rust away. Same with an onshore one. Decommissioning a nuclear power plant would probably be a matter of taking out the control rods and then entombing the pressure vessels and such. My guess is that it would cost a lot, but decommissioning a wind farm would REALLY cost a lot, if you had to remove everything and return it to some sort of pre-use level. There is a lot of distributed infrastructure inherent in a wind turbine system…think about just what it takes to get the power from each turbine to the grid. The roads to service them. The anchors. And if all this is at sea, it’s going to cost a hell of a lot to remove 100’s of the things safely.
My guess is that Cecil researched the question, and didn’t just pull the answer out of his ass, but since he is doing an article with a limited amount of text available chose not to go into details. I wish he DID, as the above are just WAGs as to what he was thinking of, and it would be interesting to know more of the details.
-XT
[QUOTE=Avatar]
Nuclear would never happen without the underwriting and subsidies of governments. If the US gov’t didn’t insure GE, they would NEVER build another plant.
[/QUOTE]
That’s true of any large scale project. Do you think that the Hover Dam could or would have been built without government involvement? The Tennessee Valley project? Hell, most of the COAL plants have some level of subsidy involved, be it in deferred taxes or loans.
The government DOES subsidize wind and solar though, so it’s a false comparison. No matter how much money the government pours into either they aren’t going to get up to the level where coal or even nuclear is, however. It just doesn’t scale that way, unless you are talking about some other country than the US where lower total energy requirements and a smaller and more dense population might make it more attractive.
When you really start looking at the numbers of wind turbines, or the huge area solar would take up, the resources it would take, and the costs just to get either wind or solar up to the levels that nuclear alone is today it’s just not happening.
Um…whatever you say man…
-XT
This is all true enough, but fuel reprocessing has been discarded as too dangerous. See Home | Quirks & Quarks with Bob McDonald | CBC Radio (first segment) for an expert–at least he calls himself such–on nuclear safety talking about recent design improvement. I don’t know if he is real or if his delivery was deliberately soporific.
In addition to breeder reactors, there are also new reactor designs that burn the plutonium as part of the process. The eventual waste is free (more or less) of long-lived radioactives and much more energy is produced per unit of fuel input. The radioactivity of the waste would slowly decline over a matter of decades, not millions of years. So why aren’t they being built? Because, so the source said, they would have to begin the certification process from start and no one has been willing to do that. Of course, they would also have to rethink all the safety controls from start and that might be even harder. I wish I could remember what this new design was called so I could give a link.
Download this presentation. It explains things like capacity factor and siting for wind turbines.
http://www.windpoweringamerica.gov/pdfs/small_wind/2011/trudy_ases_siting_sizing.pdf
This chapter of David MacKay’s book “Without the Hot Air” explains the physics of Wind.
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/cB/page_263.shtml
The basic point is that wind turbines generate energy by slowing the wind down. This means that the worst place to put a wind turbine is right next to another wind turbine, since if the wind is blowing in the wrong direction, then the turbines that are downwind will generate less power. If you have several turbines close together in a line, then at the a certain point the wind slows down enough that the last turbine doesn’t turn at all.
BTW, you can download MacKay’s book for free and is an excellent reference for anyone interested in energy issues and isn’t allergic to math.
Are you thinking of a Traveling Wave Reactor?
Or maybe Thorium Reactors.
One of the things that always struck me about nuclear reactors is how low tech everything is when you come down to it.
You use a fission reaction to… boil water that powers a turbine. The whole thing isn’t much more than a giant radioactive tea kettle.
The problem is we want something to happen when we flick that light switch, and we aren’t happy being told what that light switch should do when we flip it. Use florescent bulbs which are 75% more efficient? Whole segments of the population throw a political hissy fit!
First, they take away the 100 watt light bulbs, but I didn’t say anything because I’m not a 100 watt lightbulb…
So, what are the choices:
[ul]
[li] There’s wind which can be efficient if we can simply build large megafarms that are a thousand of miles long. (NOTE: This isn’t a single plot of land, but multiple plots stretching for a thousand miles and interconnected). Wind power can be placed in a farmer’s field without reducing that fields productivity, and many farms are in fairly windy zones too. However, there are issues with bird collisions, and the dangers of these extremely tall structures with rapidly moving blades.[/li][li] There’s solar power. It’s not very efficient now, but it’ll get there. There is enough solar radiation that could meet much of our needs. Of course, most of this is in the desert Southwest far away from the major population centers. Unfortunately, there’s no real way to distribute it.[/li][li] Gas. Not enough to supply our energy needs, and fractional drilling probably causes water pollution. And, it generates greenhouse gasses.[/li][li] Coal. Less said the better. But, it’s cheap as long as you don’t make the energy companies completely liable for all the environmental damage.[/li][/ul]
Then, there’s nuclear power. It doesn’t create greenhouse gasses, and it can generally be safe. Except in the few circumstances when something goes wrong.
And, that’s the problem. Yes, the tsunami killed more people than all three major nuclear disasters combined, and much of the coast is in ruins. However, in a decade or two, it will all be rebuilt, the economy will be healed, and the destruction will be a memory.
After 25 years, Chernobyl still has a 30km exclusion zone, and that will be in effect for at least another 50 or more years. Plans are being laid now for the next 50 years of management. Three Mile Island a merely minor disaster took place in 1979 and they just finished the cleanup a few years ago. In fifty years, Fukushima will still be a mess, and that 20 mile exclusion zone might remain there for just as long.
Imagine if Shorham power plant on Long Island had similar issues. A 20 mile exclusion zone would encompass 2/3rds of Long Island and reach Bridgeport and Milford Connecticut. The Northeast Corridor and I-95 would be part of that inclusion zone cutting off Boston from New York.
Or, the plant in Salem NJ. A 20 mile exclusion zone would include most of Northern Delaware and reach into the Southern suburbs of Philadelphia. It would close I-95, the NJ Turnpike, U.S. Highway 1, and the Northeast Corridor. Although the death toll might be low compared to other disasters, the economic loss would be impossible to contemplate.
What worries me most about the Fukushima disaster is that it wasn’t the earthquake and it wasn’t the tsunami that caused the problems – it was a power blackout.
The Fukushima plant shutdown just as it was suppose to after the earthquake. The problem is that after a shutdown, you still need to keep the reactor core cooled for a couple of weeks, but the plant isn’t producing any power. Therefore, you need the backup generators to power the cooling pumps.
However, the pumps were damaged, and the core started to overheat. Enough heat and the reaction of the water with the zircaloy covering over the fuel rods. This causes the water to breakdown into hydrogen and oxygen. The oxygen reacts with the covering and hydrogen builds up. the hydrogen buildup makes it impossible to pump water into the reactor to cool it. It gets vented, and explodes when it contacts with oxygen.
And that means all nuclear plants can pull a Fukushima. All it takes is some poor planning and some unfortunate circumstances. The nuclear plant shuts down and the backup pumps don’t work. Whoops!
And, it’s not just the power plant either. Like almost all power plants throughout the world, spent fuel rods are stored on site. These are stored in pools. If the water leaks from the pools, the rods will overheat and experience their own meltdown.
The funny thing is that Chernobyl accident also had to do with the cooling system. In Chernobyl, a design flaw means that the backup pumps can’t start pumping water into the reactor until a couple of minutes after the reactor turns off. Unfortunately, that’s too late to prevent a disaster.
The people in charge of the plant were trying an experiment to see if you can generate some electricity to power the pumps with residual steam after the reactor shuts down. Unfortunately, the experiment was poorly thought out, and the Soviet government tried to hide the extent of the disaster using my favorite technique to handle major issues: You ignore it and hopes it goes away.
Let’s face it. If we want lots of power, and we don’t want to generate greenhouse gasses, we probably will have to use nuclear power. As Cecil points out, it isn’t as dangerous as most people make it out to be. However, it isn’t as clean and safe as most advocates make it out to be either.
If we are going to use nuclear power, it needs some fixing. We need to get away from water cooled reactors which are very complex and prone to all sorts of issues when cooling fails. Molten Sodium Chloride Cooled Rectors hold some promise. For example, when things go really wrong, you end up encasing the core in a solid block of salt. The salt doesn’t produce steam and it doesn’t react with the fuel creating hydrogen which causes a lot of issues.
Many companies have been working on “micro reactors”. These are self contained power plants about the size of a shipping container. You can take them to a site, and bury them 30 feet into the ground and leave them there for 10 to 30 years. Then, they can be shutdown, unburied, and taken back to the factory for refueling. Some of these are designed to use gas or molten sodium for cooling which simplifies keeping the reactor cool.
We are going to need nuclear power whether we like it or not. But, we must admit to the various issues they present. We need to know what happens when we decommission a plant. We need to know how to safely transport and dispose of the fuel. We need to be able to provide the security necessary to keep these plants safe.
It’s a 20 kilometer evacuation zone, not a 20 mile one…and I seriously doubt whether 50 years from now that evacuation zone will still be in effect. The radiation levels outside of the immediate environment of the plant just aren’t that high. They are higher than the legal limits in some places, but they aren’t going to remain that way indefinitely. It’s just no where near to being the same as what happened at Chernobyl.
-XT