Yes, but suppose you have $2 trillion to invest in new electrical generation. How do you spend that money? Do you build $2 trillion worth of nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers, then sail them to the harbors or major cities, and hook them into the electrical grid? Or do you build $2 trillion worth of nuclear power plants?
Which plan do you think will result in cheaper nuclear power?
You seem to have the idea that the existing fleet of nuclear powered naval vessels would, if hooked into our electrical grid, provide a significant amount of electricity. But that is false. All the nuclear wessels combined would provide less than 1% of the electrical needs of the country.
If you want more nuclear power plants, which do you think will be cheaper to build and operate? A nuclear power plant that just sits there? Or a nuclear power plant that floats and has a built-in miniature airport?
First, running a “suitably large cable” won’t work. A town power grid is high voltage, typically 10,000-12,000 volts. The generators on a submarine provide 120 volts. So it would take a big transformer installation to connect to the grid. And military power is at 400Hz instead of the 60Hz standard used in civilian systems. I don’t know how you could change that for such a high power demand.
Second, the amount of electricity needed by a town like Groton is way more than
a nuclear submarine could supply. Possibly they could supply power for some of the nearby port facilities, but surely not the whole town.
Sounds like either an urban legend or a greatly exaggerated story.
I seem to recall someone here, probably Sam Stone, citing that Canada’s CANDU reactors could be built for about a billion each give or take.
Without doing anything more than some quick head scratching, 2000 CANDU reactors could pretty much meet ALL of Americas fuel and power needs. Thats “only” about 7000 dollars per American to say fuck you to everybody else and virtually eliminate our greenhouse emissions.
Probably 99% nonsense. They are much more expensive that you claim, there probably isn’t enough heavy water in the world to run 2000 of them, the infrastructure needed to move the electricity would cost even more than the reactors.
There is a massive amount of salt water produced by certain oil and gas wells that is then reinjected into the ground. If you really wanted to have a salt water desalination plant, put it near a field that produces a water. The oil and gas company would love it also since they wouldn’t have to pay the expense of reinjecting the water. There is one field in central Texas that produces approximately 1.5 million barrels of salt water a day and simply reinjects it into the ground. There are fields like that all over the gulf coast. Why would you want to pipe in salt water from the Gulf when there is already plenty of it produced on land?
I’m pretty sure I used a number closer to 4 billion each, and the project I mentioned was to provide enough energy to meet the U.S. transportation needs if the transportation fleet converted to electrical power. I think about 200 CANDU style reactors would be required for that, at a cost of roughly a trillion dollars. The proposal I saw had 178 reactors located in Nevada, processing spent fuel from American reactors (CANDU fuel cycles include spent waste from U.S. LWR designs), and turning it into something less dangerous, then depositing it in Yucca Mountain. Water from Lake Meade would be used, and the process would generate hydrogen and the heavy water used in the reactors, making the entire energy cycle more efficient. The hydrogen would then be used in fuel cells to power the transportation infrastructure.
This is obviously speculative and a fairly long way off, but it gives you an idea of the kind of scale we’re talking about just for transportation. To replace all of America’s coal plants would be a significantly bigger job.
If you want to deliver fresh water on the globe by desalination, the best way seems to be a wind-wheel / solar powered device tested on a Greek island some years back. It swam in the bay and made not only fresh water: because it was clean, algae grew on the under-water structures, which attracted fish to eat them, which could be fished (in moderation) as additional bonus.
Volkswagen, together with one of the alternative power companies in Germany, are working on the “everybody has a power station in their basement” model, only not with fusion, but a combination diesel generator: electricity and heat. By using the exhaust heat for the furnace (via heat exchanger and warm water tank storage), the efficency overall is about 70% - higher than normal electric only power stations. The plan is that the power companies leases the engines to the customers and the customers feed the surplus electricity they don’t need back into the electric grid. So instead of one big power station, you have 5 000 small stations, connected by the grid, and at much smaller cost (only several thousands Euros). Plus, the mechanics of diesel engines have been improved and refined for over 100 years and are thus well understood and easy to repair, as opposed to a big power station.
Because it would be a pain to drag a nuclear submarine to the middle of Texas.
Remember how this water pumping idea developed. First it is, ‘how much juice can we get with all of these superfluous nuclear naval vessels’? Then it was, ‘What else could we do with them?’ Since I am concerned about supply limits to oil, and do not share the confidence of others that any oil supply shortfalls could easily be met with natural gas and oil shale, I wondered if contributing water to pump into natural gas wells might be a better use. But I received a scathing objection to that on the grounds that all that saltwater would poison the land all around. So I suggested desalinization.
Now you say they’re already pumping saltwater out of the middle of Texas, and why don’t we desalinate that instead? First, is petro-well water our best choice? Second, if they are pumping the saltwater back into the ground without ill effect, there is no point in desalinating it. Just pump the saltwater. Because I am skeptical that water supplies are sufficient for natural gas and oil shale to deliver a significant addition to our fuel supply.
No one has mentioned anything past the practicality of generating the power. Let’s give the OP what he wants: I now have a magic power generation box on my desk. It’s power output is infinite, any load you present it can handle. And it uses no fuel (like I said, magic).
So what happens? Power generation costs go to zero, since I didn’t bother to put a meter on this thing for billing. Net result - you still have a power bill, for transmission and distribution costs. If you figure generating costs account for one third of your bill, then your bill is cut by 33%. Power is cheaper, but not free. I only made one of these boxes, and don’t really want to build another since this one isn’t making any money for me.
As luck would have it, I actually worked on that program’s press releases. It is indeed a cool concept. However, the spokespeople for it readily admit that the only reason this is going forward at all is because of staunch German anti-nuclear sentiments and lobbies. Germans just don’t want any nuke plant, not now, not later, not ever.
Nuclear power, centralized or not, would be even cheaper in the long run, and pollute less (diesel and bio-diesel have one heck of a carbon footprint) - but Germans plain refuse them.
Anyway, I wasn’t decrying a de-centralized energy model - just cracking wise at the idea of letting unsupervised fusion reactions happen in people’s cellars and the shed out back, with the high safety standards that entails
Not sure if the story is correct or not (though I have heard similar versions), but there are a couple of erroneous statements in your post, t-bonham.
The turbogenerators on a U.S. nuclear submarine produce three-phase, 60-Hz, 450-volt electricity. (While there are some 400-Hz systems on submarines, the 400-Hz power is produced indirectly by specialized motor-generators.)
Secondly, as soon as submarines tie up in port, they connect up shore power cables and match frequency and voltage to shore so that the submarine can shut down its reactor. So the connection network, including appropriate transformers, are already in place for shore power.
If the local community was experiencing a power outage, there’s no reason why you couldn’t connect up and supply some of the local community power requirements. The real bottleneck would be, as you state, how much you could power. The two turbogenerators on a typical sub are only about 3,000 KW each, and a significant fraction of this would be needed for the sub itself. However, if the local electric utility opened buses to limit the amount of external electrical load, a sub could supply some local needs. A squadron of submarines could do even better.
In fact, if the local area did lose power for any length of time, all of the docked submarines would actually be required to either start up their emergency diesel generators or their reactors.
Incidentally, I trained on a naval nuclear prototype plant. We were permanently connected to the electrical grid to simulate “shore power.” We usually drew power off the grid, but when our plant was up and running, we often raised our voltage slightly to push some power onto the grid so that we weren’t just wasting the power. (Most of the prototype’s power went to the main engines with a simulated propeller that essentially just converted the power to waste heat.)
