I used to live in the Mojave Desert, and spent many hours flying over it. One thing about the desert is that it has a lot of space. Generally, it’s also sunny. (There are exceptions during the monsoon season – August – and in the Winter. But it’s usually sunny, and what clouds there are are often scattered.)
I love deserts (though I like living in the cooler climes where I am now), and do not want to see them damaged. Damage takes a long, long time for Nature to repair in the desert. But as I said, deserts are big. There’s plenty of room for Nature and solar power plants. From personal, non-scientific, observations, human structures do not seem to do much damage to wildlife. Jackrabbits still bound, black widow spiders would probably appreciate the angles if they had the capacity for appreciation, and crows still fly. Sidewinders and other reptiles face some problems when humans are around, but still manage to hang on in out-of-the-way parts of sprawling facilities. Coyotes tend to stay away, but in the artificial farmlands I’ve still heard their calls in the early morning. Edwards AFB, a sprawling complex with all its concrete, machinery, hazardous substances, and activity still has desert tortoises. (And they protect them.) In short, we could cover square miles of desert with solar collectors and the vast majority of the desert will be untouched. People have no problem with turning deserts into alfalfa fields, so there should be no worries about solar plants that leave the local flora and fauna in place.
Which is not to say that we shouldn’t or don’t need to build nuclear power plants. We should and we do. Old plants are pretty safe. New designs are safer. Waste could be reprocessed and used again. I heard the other day that with reprocessing the amount of waste produced for each person would fit into a soda can, instead of the (unremembered but large) amount we make today. (Only the price of nuclear fuel would have to rise tenfold to make reprocessing economically feasible.)
This isn’t a restaurant where you have a choice of soup or salad. We can and should choose our solar soup and nuclear salad. And a windy dessert, too.
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I agree, actually. I have no problem supplementing nuclear power with wind, hydroelectric and other forms of solar power. But fossel fuel plants have to go.
Why not? Everyone else does. I estimate the practical IQ of voters drops by at least twenty points the minute they enter a polling station.
Nuclear fusion is indeed the ultimate goal of (relatively) clean an presumably safe terrestrial energy production. However, even the most optimistic estimates place practical over-unity fusion production at thirty years out; a more realistic estimate for getting practical fusion power on-line and replacing a significant amount of conventional energy production is more likely fifty or sixty years, and this presumes no major stumbling blocks in scaling the process up to useful levels. And we don’t really have a good handle on how much the operating costs of hypothetical fusion plants may be; even if we establish a practical, scalable process, it may be that the necessary infrastructure and safeguards will not make it fiscally competitive with other sources. We’ll certainly need some way to manufacture large quantities of tritium (assuming that the D-T cycle is chosen as the most practicable route to fusion) which harkens back to needing fission reactors or some other energetic neutron source. It is one thing to talk about “free” power, but in fact, the infrastructure and technology to support fusion may be uncompetitively costly, even after fusion itself is workable.
The sum total is that while we may be targeting fusion as a future energy source, we’re going to need other workable sources that can scale up for future energy needs at least in the interim. Wind and solar are good supplements that result in low levels of direct pollution, but I don’t think any realistic evaluation of their potential renders them credible as a complete replacement for coal and oil, or are even competitive in their total production cycle cost. On that basis, we’ll probably need nuclear fission (or hybrid fission-fusion) as a significant part of our future energy portfolio.
The o.p., of course, makes a very disingenuous statement: “Meanwhile, nuclear energy has supplied not a single watt of new power in the US in the past 30 years…”, which is due to deliberate regulatory constipation that has nothing to do with the state of nuclear technology or safety of the proposed plants. And as Una Persson points out, the same kind of tactics has resulted in a dearth of coal plants being approved for construction.
NOTHING can go away at this point. Right now we’re getting almost half our energy from Coal, and that’s not going away. Magic technology and wishful thinking about alternative energy sources aren’t going to replace that stuff in less time than it takes to build new nuclear plants.
How about we call you out on it. Where is the location of any new nuclear power generation source in the US? There isn’t one. At the very best that chart shows that existing nuclear plants are putting out more onto the grid from existing piles. There hasn’t been a new reactor connected to the grid in the US for decades. And there won’t be another for years to come. You are called out to stop linking to charts that don’t say what you say they say.
Solar kicked your nuclear ass last year and link to a chart that shows what? More efficient turbines replacing old ones?
I know people on the project, but I’m not by any stretch involved in it. My understanding is that the core driver behind it is reliability and stability, to prevent blackouts like the last big midwest one, as opposed to improving T&D efficiency. Of course there are some sections of the plan which would improve efficiency. I’m in favor of it; our current grid is so much a hodgepodge of about 27 early competing systems that Smartgrid would help make things better in a lot of ways. And IIRC it would help facilitate easier hook-up of renewable resources to the main grid, thus driving wind and solar etc. growth.
It’s unclear what your point is, except that the nuclear power industry has been shackled by regulatory fiat while the highly subsidized wind power industry has had modest expansion that in no way indicates that it will provide a near-term replacement for fossil fuel energy production.
This is very nearly the most idiotic effort I’ve seen to refute a well-cited claim. This is verging into Moon Landing Hoax territory.
Is is a nuclear pile-on? Is there a government bail-out if there is a default? Anyway, 10 new wind giga-watts of wind power installed last year vs zero new for nukes. Debunked indeed. Nuclear is the Chicago Cubs of electricity.
No, it doesn’t, it means that the newer turbines they are replacing the worn out turbines with are more efficient than the original models at squeezing the watts out of the already existing steam from the reactors. This in an improvement in steam power, not new nuclear capacity. There are now new nuclear reactors in the US for decades. The same thing is happening when coal is burned to make steam in coal factories and the turbines of old are replaced with better new ones.
Thanks. The DPU in Massachusetts is a strong proponent of Smart Grid. It’s also pushing the utilities hard to get plans worked out and set up to implement the state’s 2008 Green Communities Act. How much energy will that save? We’ll see. Certainly demand-side capacity can’t take the place of new generation to meet need, but it can help to reduce the total GW we’ll have to construct no matter what resources find favor with developers and regulators.
You didn’t say, in your earlier post, that there has been no increase in nuclear capacity. You said, specifically, that “nuclear energy has supplied not a single watt of new power in the US in the past 30 years.”
The cite provided by Una shows that it has. The fact that the extra power coming from the nuclear plants is the result of the efficiencies you describe does not negate the fact that these nuclear plants are now producing more power than they were before.
No-one here has ever claimed otherwise.
If you’re going to make claims, then you should be specific about what claim you’re making if you don’t want to look (even more) like a moron.
No, they are not producing any more power at all: everything but the nuclear is doing better. Una’s chart does not even purport to show additional capacity, but rather what is produced. Of course, I don’t expect that you will understand that a more efficient turbine isn’t the same as a new reactor.
