There were TWO deaths.
One guy got electrocuted installing SOLAR PANELS, not scratching his ass. The other guy tripped and died, carrying…wait for it…you’ll recognize the words…SOLAR PANELS.
Where are my photos of maimed and parentless children? How about some photos of abandoned towns due to solar power production accidents? Here’s a couple for you:
Prypriat, Ukraine and Centralia, PA. Why are they abandoned? Gee, 'cause it’s too toxic to live there.
So, that’s a no-can-do?
Impressive source. :rolleyes:
Perhaps you could address how feasible your Wiki-linked claim on Page 1 was of us using that 60% of our hydropower potential which we’re currently “throwing away.”
I’ll get it started - microturbines do not have the economy of scale that large turbines do, there is already environmental outcry about damming of water resources (I’ve faced the protesters myself at a dam site) and the impact on land use, flora and fauna; the net capacity factor of microturbine and small-scale turbines does not compare with that of large dams and is only arguably baseload generation…and while small dam failures are not nearly at catastrophic as a boiler explosion, I’ll invite you to look at the outrageous number of small dams in poor repair and imminent danger in the US, which I believe I researched for someone a while ago. Then we can talk about the T&D support and transformer infrastructure needed for all these micro, mini, and small water turbines, which will suffer from some of the same issues that wind farms currently do in that regard. We can even address the potential cultural problems which can form due to new lakes and ponds - surely nothing on the order of what Egypt and Turkey have seen, but clearly not all the potential resources for small-scale hydro are going to be in a politically sensitive location. We can even go into some intangibles, such as the possibility of new small lakes and ponds impacting water intake levels for residential supply downstream, the concentration of agricultural herbicides and pesticides in some areas, the propagation of noxious water flora and the person-power required to keep it clear…good grief, and I haven’t even had to crack open my Dam Engineering textbook.
(FTR, the Fieldston report which is supposed to back up your claim is a dead link from Wiki, and has been for some time, which again casts doubt on the viability of Wikipedia in energy discussions, but I digress.)
My point is that pointing to a Wiki page and claiming an idea is good is fraught with problems. Is small scale hydro neat? Sure, in some cases. Here again the question raises its head - if it’s so great, why isn’t everyone and their grandma doing it? Probably for any 3-5 of the reasons I briefly listed above.
Before you misunderstand, I don’t argue for the status quo. I argue from the point that this shit is not easy.
I have no doubt you are far more knowledgeable with regard to this than I.
Here’s a report within the DOE survey I believe the wiki article was referencing. [warning: PDF] It’s available through the Idaho National Labratory. I’d be happy to hear your thoughts on it.
I guess for the same reason other alternative energies are not being developed. Nobody can agree on which methods are worth the investment and effort.
So true. That’s one of the reasons why I’d prefer a hand of five cards to one or two. It’s the simple idea of scaling solutions and matching solutions to their appropriate environments. Generating power to feed to needs of millions of people, whichever you choose is going to have its downsides. I’m not convinced that generating massive amounts of nuclear waste and burying that waste in the ground to forget about it is the best course of action.
It’s akin to the GHG emissions problem - if you read the IPCC consensus (consensii?) the feeling one gets is this nagging sense of creeping despair, as the amount that GHG emissions must be reduced to reverse current trends is so great, that I do not see how it can be done. I attended a conference in California late last year where several energy policy makers all addressed that issue from various angles and with various political spins - but the common thread among all of them, actually the unanimous thread, is that even at an accelerated rate of growth of renewables there isn’t enough time to catch the GHG emissions curve, let alone reverse it. It appeared to me the near-consensus was that only by increasing nuclear - at least in the medium-term, mind you - can renewables be given enough R&D time to come into their own and save the world, so to speak.
My position is:
- Develop renewables, to a level and at a pace far beyond what we are now.
- Reduce energy use by 20%, via any means necessary.
- Apply a heat rate goal to help phase out old coal plants and drop coal slowly off the grid.
- I was in favour of biomass for a long time, but recent studies have me agnostic on it now. I can’t say more at this point in under 1,000 words, so I’ll let that stand on its own.
- Mandate combined cycle gas turbines with 60% or greater LCV efficiency, rather than cheap and easy simple cycles.
- And increase nuclear power, until renewables can take over, or we get fusion power (somewhere around 2300AD at the glacial pace things are going…)
To put it another way: is the potential risk from nuclear power greater than the risk of not slowing down the GHG emissions curve until we can bring it down solely by renewable energy, conservation, and unknown future tech?
On one hand we have radioactive pollution from mining and processing, accidents, radioactive waste, nuclear proliferation, and terrorism risk. On the other we have the risk of sea levels rising, atmospheric hell, crop failures, flooding, extinction of several entire species of animals, and the unknown possibility of a clathrate gun or tundra thawing “tipping point” which really screws us.
Then again, on the other hand we could argue that the impacts of GHG emissions and ACC are not proven or well-quantifiable, whereas nuclear risks are.
My high-level opinion - not a fact nor an appeal to authority - is that the nuclear risk is less than the GHG and ACC risk.
I attended a fairly convincing presentation a few weeks ago that changed my mind on this point - it seems that it is quite possible to have renewable nuclear (the supply of uranium can meet a reasonable projection of Earth’s energy needs for billions of years, essentially as long as life will be on Earth). This can be achieved with two points:
-
Breeder reactors - current Light Water Reactor technology leaves a great deal of potentially fertile/fissile material un-used. Breeder reactors, which are able to utilize much of the material not burned in LWRs, could operate ~100x longer on the same amount of raw uranium compared to LWRs, hence the fuel requirements are effectively 100x less.
-
Harvesting uranium from seawater - the reserves of uranium in the oceans are ~1,000x the mineable reserves, and ocean uranium is replenished by rivers (carrying uranium from the crust). Here is a short article describing how uranium is renewable (PDF). Harvesting of uranium from seawater has been demonstrated at the bench-scale - here’s a blog post on the topic. The only countries that would be “held hostage” by uranium suppliers would be landlocked ones.
Admittedly neither of these technologies have been implemented on a commercial scale, and I would be hesitant to guess how quickly they could be implemented (heavy-metal adsorbing polymers are already used in the water treatment industry, but I’m not sure about the scale of operations relative to what would be required to supply uranium for power plants). Nevertheless, I think there’s a good chance these developments will occur before even conventional uranium supplies for conventional usage run out.
But private industry doesn’t pay for it. Nuclear requires all sorts of loan guarantees and subsidies. Coal doesn’t.
Liability caps for one industry do not level the playing field. The law already has liability caps: the amount of damages that are proven to a jury. Artificial caps are requests for removing the right to jury trial.
Why special moratoriums on nuclear power environmental claims? That is another special subsidy for nuclear that every other industry doesn’t get.
The free market solution is to put the entire cost of coal (or renewable) on the producers of it, not to give special free market cheats to nuclear.
We have had several partial meltdowns of nuclear reactors. http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/Nuclear-meltdown#Meltdowns_that_have_occurred Chernobyl is in fact an issue with the public as an example of what can go terribly wrong. You say that this does not happen at all with other designs, yet that is not historically true.
No, they are not free, they are not environmentally cost free and they are not injury free. Moreover, they are not centralized and are just as effective in small quantities as massive arrays. They lack the complexity of fossil power plants.
I agree that this method does ignore the environmental costs of turning deserts into solar “orchards”. But we do need to study to find out what the pros and cons of that might be. Remember that there will be areas of square shade the size of panels, each surrounded by sunlight in a huge checkerboard pattern. That might be devastating, or it might have almost no impact or somewhere in between.
It would be swell if we could see some comparisons of modern wind and solar farms cost comparisons to nuclear.
They can’t be directly compared because they have different utilities.
Wind and sun cannot be replacement power sources on their own because they each have a basic flaw: if there’s no wind, there’s no wind power; if there’s no sun - like at night - there’s no solar power.
Electricity is portable over power lines. The wind is always blowing somewhere and the sun is always shining somewhere during the day. The converse is also true, anywhere the wind blows, sometimes it isn’t blowing, and sometimes the sun isn’t shining in the daytime. But enough projects in enough places guarantees a supply of some power at all times. To simply say that you cannot compare them at all, including the downtime from non-use, is the equivalent of saying that we should not conduct any studies because we wouldn’t be interested in knowing if our preconceived notions are incorrect. (For example, maybe I’m wrong, and there are times when there is no wind in the whole world, or no sunlight in the whole world, although I’m pretty sure that there is always sunlight.
Not really, actually. Not very long distance anyway. Transmission losses can be severe.
I expect that in the very near future the major distances will start being covered by superconductors using existing technology. Not as expensive as freeways and in some ways more useful.
We don’t want some power, we want enough power. Both wind and solar are unreliable, meaning you need more of the more reliable, quick response generators around to pick up the slack.
Ah yes, the room-temperature superconductor. Considering that right now a high-temp superconductor still requires a temperature of 135 K (-217 F), that’ll be a real breakthrough. And no, PdH doesn’t count for this discussion, as you’d never get enough palladium to do it economically. At least with HgBa2Ca2Cu3Ox you’re using much more common (and cheaper) elements.
The difference is that people are still living there despite the toxicity. China, you know? Give it ten years, and… well, it being China, you still won’t hear anything, but this is like watching a car accident in slow motion. The results are predictable.
A note for Hydroelectric: The recent earthquake in China was probably cased by 3 Gorges Dam.
If we can assume room-temp superconductors, we can also assume fusion power. Both are about as far away.
BRAAAAAAAAAAP
Wrong, play again.
Centralia is abandoned because THE COAL SEAM CAUGHT FIRE.
Not because of 3MI.