. Nuclear power provides 20% of electricity, and only about 8% of our total energy. 8% of our energy isn’t very much, and as I said in the Pit thread, we could easily replace 8% of our energy usage with renewables and efficiency improvements and eliminate nuclear’s contribution, practically overnight compared to nuke’s lead time.
Nuclear power is trending down:
The existing plants are just getting older, less safe, and more expensive all the time. New plants, if any at all were to be built, couldn’t come online fast enough to even replace the nuclear power lost due to decommissioning.
You can put a “major push” on nuclear if you want, it still isn’t going to add any capacity to the US, and nuke has had 50 years to prove its feasibility and worth. It’s not “still” a major source of energy, and it never was. Wind is really just beginning its “major push” and I wouldn’t even call it a “major push” yet.
One thing I’ll grant you though, nuke power does become cheap eventually. When a plant first starts up it’s inefficient, but over 5-10 years of continual use and study, they do start to become fairly good energy producers. Problem is, about the time they do that, you’ve basically got a rapidly aging radioactive Space Shuttle fleet on your hands that is too expensive to repair and heaven forbid you shake it or get it wet or ever let the power turn off, even for just a few hours, or you’ll have a disaster of quite inconveniencing and expensive proportions on your hands.
I had assumed that only the 2006 reactor was operating during the earthquake, These articles indicates that all three had in fact been running, and were SCRAMed. There was some earthquake damage and a fire in the turbine hall.
The reactors went into shutdown successfully, including the relatively old 1984 reactor, despite being only 48 miles from the epicentre as opposed to Fukushima’s 95 miles (hat tip to Magiver.) I count that as a ringing endorsement of the improved safety of more modern reactors.
Well the wiki article doesn’t seem to be very up-to-date or accurate. All three reactors were generating when the earthquake hit and they’ll probably generate for another 40 years, paying for themselves many times over. However, the past performance of this plant is entirely beside the point. The fact is, it’s a very strong indicator that well-designed reactors can be safe in the face of devastating natural disasters.
I didn’t realise the pressing problem was to replace the 8% of energy provided by nuke plants. I thought the problem was to replace the roughly 85% of energy provided by fossil fuels. Nukes can concievably do that, or concentrated solar over very large areas in desert regions. Wind doesn’t have a prayer.
That is largely due to people like yourself. Don’t get me wrong, I respect the anti-nuke position, but making it politcally very hard to get new plants constructed and then saying “and another thing, they’re all too old and new ones take too long to build!” just isn’t valid. France built up to 3.4 plants a year at its highest historic building rate. The USA is a hell of lot bigger than France with a lot more resources and five times the population. You don’t think the USA couldn’t build at least ten new plants a year if it really wanted to? There’s no political will for it, but it’s certainly possible. http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c24/page_171.shtml
Personally I’d like to see concentrated solar being built in deserts on a massive scale: a Manhattan-project level effort driven by and partly paid for by government. I don’t see private enterprise being willing to bear the financial risks of such an enterprise; everybody’s waiting for someone else to try it first. The land areas we’re talking about to make a real dent in the fossil fuel generation are enormous: Ch 25 Page 178: Sustainable Energy - without the hot air | David MacKay
I heartily recommend anyone interested in the various energy debates to spend an evening or two browsing David MacKay FRS: : Contents. (Thanks to Gary Kumquat for the link in the Pit thread.) It’s an analysis that actually has the figures, real world data from real world wind farms, hydroelectric plants, tidal barrages, solar concentrator experimental plants. It’s also huge, but you can skim and skip to the good bits. The short of it is: to supply the entire current world energy demand sustainably (defined as “for the next thousand years”) using todays technologies can only be done with concentrated solar. It can’t be done with nuclear using a simple once-through fuel cycle and known reserves of uranium ore. It can be done with nuclear if we use breeder reactors, or extract uranium from the sea, or use thorium as a reactor fuel, but those are all immature technologies.
I’d really like to see the whole world switch to concentrated solar. Mirrors all through the deserts. The USA could get its energy independence, the Middle East could export sunlight rather than oil, North Africa could actually get some economic development. Unfortunately I don’t think it’s politically achievable at the moment in a lot of places. Europe isn’t going to trust North Africa to supply all its power, for example. The USA is one of the few places with enough desert and a low enough population density to give it a go, but the near-fanatical commitment to the free market over there means it won’t start to happen until rising oil and coal prices really begin to bite. And then they’ll build nuke plants because they already know how to and public opinion is very fickle in the face of brown-outs. That’s my prediction. I don’t think powering the world with nukes will be a disaster, but I think it’s sad that we won’t give solar a proper shot.
I’ve said the same basic thing. We should be building solar thermal plants in the desert yesterday. They’re already in a practical range to invest in them.
I’ve also posed the idea of a Manhattan style project for energy independence aimed at transportation fuels. It would be nice to have a home grown diesel fuel to handle aviation and long haul trucking. We also need it as part of the consumer transport mix along with battery powered cars. It’s a win/win/win to be energy independent and green which also keeps the energy money within the economy. It’s a no-brainer.
Or at least reduce the consequent carbon footprint from them, which includes using lower carbon impact fossil fuel generation as an option in some cases as well.
People keep claiming that in this thread even though it has been amply documented that even a sizable investment in new nuclear will only possibly keep up with what is aging out. No realistic build out of new nuclear will replace sizable amounts of fossil; we need that reasonable build out to just maintain the status quo with newer safer plants. That build out is prudent, but it is no “save the day” move.
Assuming an adequate HVDC transmission grid, maybe to some degree. Otherwise useful for certain regions but not as useful for all of them.
Also oft repeated even though ample documentation has been made of the adequacy of wind resources and their current superior cost per MW compared to nuclear.
The “political” difficulty has very little to do with how few plants have been built. Few plants have been built because they are a very poor investment. “France built” because the French government paid for it in both direct and indirect subsidies and absorbed the cost. The myth of France’s wonderful program is well addressed by this The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists article.
Meanwhile we’re still seeing the actual (and political) fallout of the fukushima plant. There’s a water ban in Tokyo (140 miles away) for infants and also for a dozen food sources. And plant 3 keeps burning although apparently it’s not releasing radioactivity.
And I just saw a price tag for the new Westinghouse AP1000 nuclear plant being built in the US. $8 billion dollar estimate for 1154 MWe unit.
It has a passive shut down system with a top-down convection recirculating safety system.
Other features compared to older designs:
* 50% fewer safety-related valves
* 35% fewer pumps
* 80% less safety related piping
* 85% less control cable
* 45% less building volume
From what is being reported, the reactor could leak and even have a complete meltdown and it wouldn’t be as dangerous as something bad happening to the 40 years of fuel rods stored in each building. Or what’s left of the building.
Fresh fuel isn’t nearly as dangerous as used fuel. If the authorities can be believed of course.
As stated before, there are a 1000 people working on the plants now and they have full access to water and pumps. In western movie terms, I believe the fever done broke.
Either the USA has been refusing to invest in any kind of new power plant for far too long and is now in trouble whatever it does, or you’re building the plants the wrong way. Most of what’s in a nuclear power plant is the same as what’s in a fossil fuel power plant. Turbines, condensers, pipes, valves, mostly off the shelf. If you physically can’t replace your aging power plants (of any type) with nuclear, then you should’t be able to build fossil plants fast enough either.
Apparently the USA has a nuke plant that started construction in 1973 which “may” be completed in 2012. What the hell?
Maybe in the USA you have a low enough population density and enough spare land to replace all your nukes with wind, but good luck replacing all your fossil. Wind farms have an energy density of only 2w per sq. m of land used, so you’re going to have to do a lot of building.
“The Whitelee wind farm being built near Glasgow in Scotland has 140
turbines with a combined peak capacity of 322 MW in an area of 55 km2.
That’s 6 W/m2, peak. The average power produced is smaller because the
turbines don’t run at peak output all the time. The ratio of the average
power to the peak power is called the “load factor” or “capacity factor,”
and it varies from site to site, and with the choice of hardware plopped
on the site; a typical factor for a good site with modern turbines is 30%.
If we assume Whitelee has a load factor of 33% then the average power
production per unit land area is 2 W/m2”
To replace ONE 1000 MW plant with wind, on these figures you’re going to need three Whitlees at peak output. Except you don’t get peak output all the time, so with a load factor of 33% you’ll need nine Whitlees. About 500 km2 of wind farm, over 1000 turbines, to replace one nuke plant. But building the nuke plant somehow takes longer and costs more. What the hell, again. I’m not even going to bother with the math for replacing all US energy needs with wind.
Depends what you call political, and what you call a poor investment. A new nuke plant is expensive, true, but the fuel costs are small over its lifetime and the new plants have design lifetimes of over 60 years. Should be a GOOD investment if you can actually build the thing and sell the electricity, instead of being forced to muck around for forty years. Or if you build the thing and then you’re not allowed to turn it on, like Shoreham. Then it’s a poor investment indeed. From wiki:
“Several US nuclear power plants closed well before their design lifetimes, due to successful campaigns by anti-nuclear activist groups.[27] These include Rancho Seco in 1989 in California and Trojan in 1992 in Oregon. Humboldt Bay in California closed in 1976, 13 years after geologists discovered it was built on a fault (the Little Salmon Fault). Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant never operated commercially as an authorized Emergency Evacuation Plan could not be agreed on due the political climate after the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl accidents. The last permanent closure of a US nuclear power plant was in 1997.[1]”
Seem’s like I jumped the gun a bit on the Watts Bar plant. One reactor was completed in 1996 so it only took 23 years to make. Still slow as hell. The other was mothballed in 1988 but it is being completed now. Watts Bar Nuclear Plant - Wikipedia
We just need to work on improving reactors. Research into Integral Fast Reactors has been very promising. The biggest benefit is that they can literally eat the waste of other nuclear power plants, eliminating one of the biggest problems with nuclear power. Additionally, they use a liquid metal cooled reactor, operate at an ambient pressure, and can cool itself using the natural convection of the coolant, which means a major loss of power like what’s happening in Japan. There are a ton of other innovative safety mechanisms that would prevent problems, like a unique fuel and cladding that release neutrons in the almost impossible instance of increased heat. This means that as heat increases, the power of the core decreases.
Using this form of reactor, which is MUCH more efficient than your standard LWR, we have enough fuel to provide power for 1 billion years.
Prototypes have demonstrated the above with success, but investment is very difficult due to the extremely harsh climate for nuclear energy in the United States, which is unfortunate since increased investment and research could drive the cost of this incredibly effective technology down.
See post #575 again for cites of the extent of our wind resources. The math has been done by experts. There is plenty enough wind resource. There are issues to be worked out in fully exploiting it, but the issue is not whether or not there is enough wind to do it. And we have the technology to use it currently to replace a sizable fraction of our current worst fossil fuel stock.
See 627, 631, and 633 for cites on the current cost and time required to build a nuclear plant (and not just in the Untied States) and cited data for contrast with wind. On both counts wind wins. Your belief that building a nuclear plant is as simple as building a fossil fuel plant, and just uses off the shelf parts, is just plain very very wrong. There are parts that can only be made in a very few special foundries in the world and they can only make so many. Promises made of new plants being designed in ways that would allow for on budget and on time construction have turned out to be false. And I don’t think now is the time to make the argument that the safety inspections that have found flaws in steel welds and in poured concrete are unneeded delays.
No source is going to replace all fossil fuel, not unless you are taking a very long view. The goal, again, is to significantly reduce the damage being done, to retire the oldest and dirtiest coal plants and replace them with less dirty alternatives, and to be able to replace the aging, due to be decommissioned, nuclear plants with other carbon free generating sources, either nuclear or other, or most likely both. And to do so as cost effectively and safely and quickly as possible.
bhamlaxy, the United States is not the only country investing in research anymore. South Africa made a big bet on Pebble Bed Reactors - it didn’t pay off. Maybe China and India’s investment in thorium reactors will pay off, maybe not. And your Integral Fast Reactors have multiple countries investing in (and collaborating on) research and development programs. Maybe it will pay off as well. Maybe not. But meanwhile we need to take action to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions now. Hope that someday one of these will be ready for prime time is not a good plan to deal with our current need for lower CO2 energy and lots of it.
Back to Japan and what it means for our feelings about nuclear here in the states -
In my limited understanding the biggest problems here have been not planning for a tsunami of this size (both not having a sea wall large enough, and by not keeping the back up generators otherwise more securely located and protected), and the fact that nuclear waste stored on site is not as contained and protected as rods inside the reactor, yet still pose a major risk in case of disasters.
In my state of Illinois about 48% of electricity comes from nuclear plants and about the same from coal ones. I prefer the nuclear ones and am not too worried about getting both an earthquake and tsunami.
I am happy to see that the American nuclear industry is going to learn from what happened in Japan and likely review the degree of back-up support for critical components like pumps.
But this does raise my concern level over the issue of waste fuel being stored on sites. This episode does seem to suggest that such storage is a significant source of risk in cases of disaster. With Yucca’s demise as a long term storage facility (agree or disagree with that decision, it is a fact on the ground), Fast Reactors (that could use these spent rods as fuel) being only a future possibility and of unknown capacity to handle the waste back log, and no other large scale geological repository likely to open up soon, it seems likely that more and more will be stored on site for an indefinite future.
Given the events in Japan, how much should this growing amount of less contained material stored on sites concern us? Much of this waste is in pools like in Japan. Some is put in dry casks. According to this article the nuclear industry swears they are safe but my state has “9,301 tons of spent nuclear fuel at its power plants, the most of any state in the country”. How secure are they in case of disasters … really? And other than what the industry says, do we independently know?
That’s an impressive-looking cite with a lot of fancy verbiage and some scary looking equations, but somehow they manage to miss out exactly how many wind turbines they are talking about or the area they have to occupy. Funny, that. The bottom line is embedded in the paragraph right after equation 2:
“Optimal spacing of turbines in an individual wind farm involves a tradeoff among a number of factors (SNIP blah blah blah) Restricting overall power loss to <20% requires (SNIP blah blah). Applying this constraint to the 2.5-MW GE turbines (rotor diameter 100 m, r = 50 m) requires an interturbine areal spacing of 0.28 km2. Similar restrictions apply to the spacing of offshore turbines (rotor diameter 111 m, r = 55.5 m). For present purposes we assume an area for individual offshore turbines of 5 × 10 rotor diameters corresponding to an occupation area per turbine of 0.616 km2.”
Okay. let’s see how it adds up. A 2.5 MW turbine occupying 0.28 km2 gives an area power density of 9W / sq m, at peak output. But you very rarely get peak. They talk about operation at 20% of rated capacity, which equates to 1.8 W / sq m but let’s be generous and use 33% as my cite did. That’s 3 W / sq m of wind farm area. On land. Their offshore spacing is even worse, although admittedly offshore real estate is likely to be cheap. Not so the maintenance of thousands of turbines in a marine environment and all their subsea power hookups but we’ll overlook that. (My cite, incidentally, gave a peak of 6 W/sq m and an average of 2W/sq m, but also said with bigger turbines you could get a 30% increase on that, bringing it in line with yours.) World energy demand is coming up on 18 TeraWatts so to run the world on wind, you need (18 x 10[sup]12[/sup] / 3 / 1000,000) sq km, or 6 million square km.
Desert solar can get 20+ W /sq m with 10% conversion efficiency and that’s NOT peak: that’s averaged over day, night, low sun, high sun. Solar kicks the arse of wind so you can get the required area down to about one million square km. Maybe half that if we can make cheap 20% efficiency photovoltaics. Still a hell of a thing to contemplate, but worth doing.
Whichever way you look at it, replacing fossil is going to take a monumental effort. A completely unprecedented diversion of resources, sweat and ingenuity. And I absolutely do not accept that if the sort of effort required to set up 21.6 million wind turbines over 6 million sq km of land area was instead applied to developing nuclear, it somehow wouldn’t be feasible. Whatever way we get off fossil fuels, it’s going to be damned difficult. But to claim “impossible!” for nuke plants when the 3rd gen designs are licenced, some are already under construction, and they fit into existing distribution infrastructure, while at the same time completely glossing over what needs to be done to exploit wind or solar, is coming close to cognitive dissonance.
And a final little factoid - when comparing the costs of nuclear and wind, you only compared the cost of installed capacity. You didn’t take into account that the design lifetime of a wind turbine is 20 years while that of a modern nuke plant is sixty. Cites:
[QUOTE=levdrakon]
Worldwide, nuclear power provides about 6% of the world’s energy. In the US, nuclear power supplied 8.4% and renewable energy supplied 7.3%.
[/QUOTE]
Where are you getting that ‘renewable energy supplied 7.3%’? That seems highly unlikely, considering what they are actually comparing there and the fact that in your second cite stuff like solar, wind and geothermal don’t even have generate enough energy to make it on the chart. The only ‘renewable’ I see there is hydro…and it’s hovering at what looks like a percent or two. The others were petroleum (which is huge), coal, natural gas and wood. To me, using these figures is an attempt to deceive by doing an apples to oranges comparison…especially tossing in that last bit seemingly uncited. One has only to thing that if solar and wind COMBINED only account for a few percentage points of our overall electrical power, it’s going to be hard for them and the other renewable to combine to account for 7.3% of our overall energy.
It’s curious that you don’t want to compare wind and solar with nuclear in an apples to apples comparison, no? Well, not curious when you consider how much of our electrical energy is generated by nuclear (even after it’s languished for decades) compared to how much is generated by wind and solar combined, even after those technologies have been pushed hard in the last few years.
So what? Why do you think this number is important? Nuclear isn’t going to replace petroleum…which is the largest percentage of our over all energy use according to your own cite. Neither is wind or solar. And if nuclear is ‘only’ 8% of our total energy, where does that put wind and solar? It would be off the scale, since in an apples to apples comparison, nuclear produces 20% of our electrical energy, while wind and solar combine do something like 2-3%.
We couldn’t ‘easily’ replace 8% of our energy just because when you compare nuclear to our overall energy use (which is massive) the number ‘8’ is smaller than the number ‘20’. You have to look at what it would take to replace 20% of our generated electricity to determine if it would be ‘easy’ or not (it wouldn’t be…it would take a massive investment to get wind and solar to produce 20% of our generated electricity, and you’d still have the problem that they are both niche energy sources…when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining they aren’t going to be pushing that 20% into the gird).
Sadly you are right here. There won’t be a major push in nuclear because that well has been totally poisoned by you anti-nuke types. So, we’ll just stay with coal for the foreseeable future and how that all this global warming stuff has it wrong. Maybe if we are lucky in 20 or 30 years wind and solar will finally produce enough electricity to overtake nuclear, which will most likely continue to decline in the US over that period. Hope that makes all you anti-nuke types feel happy and proud!
I just read this article about Chu’s latest statements and wanted to bring it here. Usually I completely agree with Chu’s perspectives and admire his thinking. (After all, it is the same position I have been espousing in this thread - we need a diverse energy supply beginning now, and investing in future potentials is part of our long term answer) but this time he is promotong small module reactors and I think he has it a bit wrong.
Yes, the smaller size is a big advantage. If nothing else it makes building a pool of investors less daunting. I do not see the huge safety plus to having 40 small reactors all capable of having a smaller meltdown instead one bigger reactor capable of having a bigger meltdown. It does not solve the waste issue. And finally there is the cost - that comes to $2 million/MW for 7 years, compared to even the high end estimates of larger plants costing $8 million/MW for at least 40 to 60 years, and wind at high end of $2.6 million/MW for land based and $5 million/MW for offshore - each of which should last 20 years plus.
I can’t say I see the big advantage.
Yes matt replacing all fossil fuel would be monumental. And is unrealistic. Moving to a combination of lower impact fossil fuels (natural gas and perhaps less dirty coal or at least fewer of the dirtiest ones) and on net more CO2-free options (maintaining the share of nuclear as some age out and renewables of various sorts as is most applicable to particular locales) is however very doable.
And also yes, the life span of a wind farm is shorter and that is a good point. OTOH the fact that they can up and running faster is also significant. Not counting perceived safety concerns and cost of waste disposal (a still to be determined item) and interest while waiting for the plant to produce it seems they come out as a near wash.
xtisme, to the degree that we have cost-effective low CO2 electricity we may displace a fair amount of petroleum. Between electric vehicles and fuel cells with the hydrogen produced with low CO2 electricity and biodiesel and synfuels using electric plant outputs as feedstocks, our future hopefully is much less oil intense - not that there will be much choice sooner or later.