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Green Energy Now, And On The Tide
thpr writes "The Electric Power Research Institute and its partners have completed their Offshore Wave Power Feasibility Demonstration Project, which defined potential wave energy projects off the shores of the United States. This is building off of work already done in Scotland (and elsewhere). San Francisco, New York and other areas are considering trial installations of the technology. It is interesting to note (table 1 in the report) that the energy density (kW/m^2) that can be achieved is much higher than wind or solar. In addition, harnessing 24% of available wave energy near the US at 50% efficiency is equal to all of the hydropower currently generated in the US (~7% of total electricity production). On a separate note, in the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy's $1.2B 2006 budget the Department of Energy is closing out the Hydropower Technologies Program. Maybe that's why this technology is missing from our National Energy Policy?" Until it reaches maturity, though, U.S. readers can pay for other forms of green energy.
24 percent is a lot .. that's basically thousands of miles of coast. For what? 7% of energy? And what about maintenance costs? Effects on marine life .. Imagine dolphins or whales getting caught in this .. ships .. can ships operate safely?
Is when nuclear energy is going to be put back on the agenda. I mean compared to coal it is squeaky clean!
As great - or as needed - as green energy may be, we'll never see widespread adoption of it. At least, not so long as the oil industry exists.
In other words, these projects affect the currents, at least locally which in turn *will* affect the biological systems that depend on these currents, to what extent? I don't think we know.
We need alternate energy, but we need to honestly compare the impact of each energy extraction method we consider. Personally, I think nuclear is the lowest impact energy tech.
I've made up my mind and now I've got to lie in it.
Yes, because the toxic waste from mining and radioactive leavins' are so green and renewable.
First person who says "pebble-bed reactors" gets to ask why no one has mentioned drawbacks of these reactors yet. I don't believe the hype until someone is willing to discuss the downsides.
It is interesting to note (table 1 in the report) that the energy density (kW/m^2) that can be achieved is much higher than wind or solar.
Yeah, but what about what really matters -- kilowatt hour per dollar.
Seeing as these things tend to be a while outwards in the ocean, where the waves arent really that high yet, I'd guess that they would (I could be dead wrong here).
Now would their support systems survive and still allow them to produce effective power? That, I'm no so sure about.
There's no such thing as a free lunch. Once we install enough tidal energy collectors, there will be no more big waves. Before long, all the newspapers will be full of stories about sad and lonely surfers:
"Dude, I heard about a gnarly 1 foot wave off the coast of the Bering Strait."
"Woah, what are we waiting for? Let's grab our boards and ride!"
Won't someone please think of the surfers!
...we put it back in the ground. Fundamentally, that's the same as oil.
My car's about due for an oil change. I take it you wouldn't mind me dumping out the old oil into the ground? After all, it came from the ground, so I can put it back there, right?
No? How about if I wait until next time I go to Nevada and dump it out there, in the middle of nowhere where no one (and nothing) lives? What if everyone did this?
If we're using a lot of the stuff, we need a good place to put the waste, or a way to recycle it. Not saying it can't be done, but there aren't too many good places to put spent nuclear fuel rods.
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We know it's the future. We know with adequate research spending it can be achieved and will make any talk of green or nuclear power pointless. It can be both done before going to Mars, for comparable price, and will help greatly with achieving that goal. It will eradicate global warming by letting us produce cheap hydrogen. So what are we waiting for?
It'll be a barrier to coastal erosion which badly effects some parts of the world.
The energy is still there, in the form of waste heat, after the electricity is used to _do_ something. It may be taken out of the ocean, but it ain't taken out of the Earth.
Did you stop to think that the ocean life in those areas needs those waves and currents to survice and that this system might damage them?
I'm curious as to what potential impact on the ocean wave power may have. I believe there was a /. story recently about how wind power will actually take the kinetic energy out of wind and affect global weather patterns. Surely taking the kinetic energy from the ocean must have some sort of impact on some sort of ecosystem.
Hopefully it won't have any serious negative impact as this technology seems promising.
When will people realize that the real problem here is that there are just too many people?
Well, considering that burning coal puts out more radioactivity than nuclear energy (not to mention all the soot, CO2, CO, etc), I'd say that nuclear is pretty green. It could be made even more green if we didn't ban reprocessing. A recent discover (or was it wired?) had a nice article on it, pick it up, it can tell you a lot more than me.
There are 11 types of people in the world: those who can count in binary, and those who can't.
Did you stop to think that the ocean life in those areas needs those waves and currents to survice and that this system might damage them?
Hmm, first of all.. These generators won't keep people from surfing because they'll be pretty far out at sea.
Secondly, they are not going to "stop waves" or affect much the area where they are.
Thirdly, they'll have a much smaller impact on local and global life than coal plants and other ancient technologies. Global warming will affect billions - basically all life on earth, I think that a few barrel-looking things at sea is a good price to pay to help generate clean energy.
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
Future energy challenges of the United States and the earth in general have a lot more to do with a growing population with more consumption of energy per capita than how we actually generate more energy.
As engineering advances allow us to have more energy, this also allows us to have a higher world population as modern agriculture is highly dependent upon machines (which require energy), pesticides and artificial fertilizers (which require energy to produce) and last but not least transportation (which requires a lot of energy) to get the kind of yields and logistical network to get food from the farms to wherever people happen to be living.
Increasing our ability to generate more energy just creates a bigger problem in that it allows more people to exist on this planet while unchecked by nature's nasty method of population control called starvation.
As long as third world countries can just keep pumping out more and more people and export them to industrialized nations with no real immigration controls (such as the United States), the problem will just get worse and worse.
Get world population under control and you solve most of the short term energy problems the world faces and in the meantime perhaps technology will catch up to the future energy demands of the planet so that humanity can sustain larger populations on the planet. But if you just allow the people of third world countries to breed like crazy and then give all of their people refuge in the wealthier nations, then population growth across the planet will continue to rise exponentially.
Summary of said article: the industry is going to be building 20-years-behind-the-times reactors which will merely replace the existing reactors. And a lot of other hot air/meaningless commentary.
This guy needs to check his facts. No one is trying to say that pebble bed reactors are going to solve the energy crisis. The industry is developing (and has developed) more efficient, smaller, safer 3rd generation PWRs (pressurized water reactors) that use the same concept as traditional reactors but with vastly improved design (source: Nuclear News, November 2004). As a nuclear engineer, I can tell you that these will be the new reactors.
There is, of course, also the point that old reactors are aging. Yes, they are. Maintenance and reevaluations of those facilities are constantly under way, and they will likely be safe to operate for many more years. In the meantime, more modern reactors will be built at an increasing rate that will not only compensate for reactors that must be shut down in the future but also provide more energy.
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
Not this again?
You don't seem to realize just how big the planet is compared to these things.. The cargo ships and oil tankers are thousands and thousands and thousands on our seas.. Do they have a big impact?
Did tall buildings in cities stop all the wind? Forest?*sigh*
These things would actually replace coal plants and other crappy sources.. That would have a NET POSITIVE EFFECT on the planet.
Why are people so quick to complain about any minuscule disadvantage of a green source, but they never talk about coal and oil and such? Because it's new? I thought slashdot users liked new things..
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
This means that each man woman and child would need 174 square meters of panel to be responsible for all the energy made and used in their name!
This, of course, sounds like a lot, but consider the amount of roof surface the average suburban home has. The Average US home is 2,300 sq. ft., which equals ~214 sq. meters. (Okay, so the average 2,300 sq. ft. home is probably 2-story, but humor me) Also consider the amount of roof space there is on office buildings, etc. and consider the reduced amount of line losses there would be in such a distributed grid. It would still likely be prohibitively expensive, and even if it weren't, it probably wouldn't be feasible at 30% efficiency, but there is a pretty good chance that efficiency will continue to increase, and that at some point it could look like a very reasonable option.
I'm not going to bother to check your math, I'll just quote from a January 2005 report of the Solar Energy Industries Association:
"Solar collectors on a 100-by-100-mile area in the Southwest could generate as much electricity as the United States consumes in a year. Alternatively, solar systems on roofs, parking lots, and other developed land across the nation could generate all the electricity we need--now, in 2030, and 2050--without building on the nation's open spaces."
I've seen similar figures from Sandia labs.
I'm really puzzled why people always try to figure out how much space would be taken up by a centralized solar power plant. The appealing thing about solar power (and fuel cells, and wind power) is that it's distributed--generating units are scattered wherever power is necessary. If you think about it that way, the space taken up by solar panels (or whatever) is negligible.
Go into an urban or suburban area and see how much space is taken up by buildings with flat roofs, parking lots, etc. Imagine that space covered by solar panels. Now realize that you can clad tall office buildings in solar panels that look like glass (and that let light through to the interior). There's an idea--make the buildings generate some of the power that they consume.
Aight, I've seen tons of misinformation and bogus speculation here, and I just perused the document!!
(1) The facility is out to sea. Hawaii is the closest at 2.5KM, while California is at 13 to 20 Km.
(2) They are in about 40M of water. Waves break in about 1-4M of water, depending on size.
(3) The things FLOAT on TOP of the water! (The "Pelamis" design does anyway.) They are mored with cable, and are no where near breakers.
(4) They are not so much "wave" energy as "swell" energy (ie waves = coastal, swell = deep ocean).
Huge variation in wave height makes near-shore uneconomical when waves are small (often), and SEVERELY dangerous when large. (Name a man made structure that has withstood BREAKING waves or a sustained period of time.)
Even when waves are small on the coast, deep sea swells still oscillate across the surface unhindered. The point is to harness these oscillations for energy (as far as I can tell).
The environmental impact will be truly negligable, except for moorings and swell energy depleted before it reaches the coastline.
The very environmentally-paranoid surfer in me says... Go for it!
-Pie
The reason I believe this is because electronics in peoples homes are growing at a faster rate than "green technology" (like solar power) is improving.
The amount of solar panels required to power the 3 computers, 4 TV's, 2 PlayStations, DVRs, cordless phones, etc. in my house in cloudy/rainy NY would be crushing.
Sure the green tech will improve, but then add in faster/more computers, another DVR, Xbox 3, dual core 4GHz processors, several more gig of RAM, and a few TB of HDD storage and I am right back at square one.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
That's why you don't rely on a single power source. AFAIK, we don't do that now in the US or Canada. I can't speak for other parts of the world.
There are a lot of rooftops that can be used for panel installations--and if that solar paint pans out, sweet.
Wind generators are quiet, look kinda neat, and can be set up to scare off birds with scarecrows. Again, you can't rely on it everywhere--but that goes for everything, least of all sources that require mining for fuel and either particulate/gaseous exhaust, or waste products that shouldn't go near biological habitats for, oh, a few thousand years. That includes the reactors that will ultimately have to be decommissioned and replaced.
Then there's the biggie--drastically reducing individual consumption and increasing the efficiency of what energy usage remains. What a concept. Unfortunately, I don't see this last one taking off short of a catastrophe (or a simple reduction in remaining supply) that would make fossil fuel sources unavailable and nuclear or renewable systems unusuable or too minimal to make available in short order.
Hey, no one said this shit would be easy, but I think such changes will be necessary to ensure the viability of widespread human, and even animal and plant habitation on the surface and in the seas of this rock.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
Why would you build a solar power plant using photovoltaic cells. Mirrored surfaces focussed on a water pipe, generating steam to drive a turbine, is considerably cheaper and far more efficient.
Now find out the total roof space in the USA. The figure should pleasantly surprise you.
The demand had better not grow exponentially, as the available energy resource is finite within our reach (or in the universe).
It's utopian thinking to assume that there will always be some power source available to meet the demand. Example? Blackout in NYC. Humans are going to learn this in a hard way unless we individuals start waking up and smell the coffee.
Besides, what I'm saying is not entirely unreasonable. Imagine a light bulb that consumes 60W of the electrical power. A cheap one will generate a lot of heat (IR). And unless you have IR vision, it ain't gonna make your room any brighter. On the other hand, design a light bulb that radiates mostly in the visual wavelength, while little is radiated away as heat. Now that will allow you to consume less energy but generating the same lumen as the cheap light bulb. Isn't that a profoundly wiser course of action for the civilization to take?
Think about that one a bit.
Let's look at what the article argues.
Its first point is that, because new nuclear capacity will merely replace plants scheduled for decomissioning, new nuclear plants won't actually reduce CO2 emissions. This is true. But then, not building said plants would create additional amounts of CO2 from the new power plants that would have to be built to replace the decomissioned ones. The article says that "In essence, the industry is merely fighting to preserveits 20 percent share of the domestic electricity market." So, does that mean that the 20% is not worth fighting for? Especially given that most of it is generated on the densely populated east coast, where replacing it with coal would add much to an already polluted area.
Second argument: pebble-bed isn't ready yet, so the new plants built in the next few years would have to be conventional designs. True, but this ignores the fact that twenty years of development have gone in to reactors since the last one was built. Today's reactors, while based on old principles, will be quite different from those of yesterday. They will operate more efficiently. I don't know much about their economics, and they may indeed be subsidized. We have to ask ourselves whether taxpayer money for clean energy is acceptable.
Third argument: some nonsense about how nuclear energy denies the option of "an innovation economy." I'm not going to bother with this one, really.
Final argument: distributed power generation is the future. The author emphasizes small-scale gas turbines, which do nothing to reduce CO2 emissions and ignore the fact that natural gas supplies are getting increasingly expensive. It seems intuitively obvious to me that efficiency losses in small generating equipment are higher than transmission losses from large power plants. Solar power is mentioned, which is a marginally useful solution even in the middle of the desert.
Well, my tune has not changed...
Nix absolutably seriousness.
It's quite silly to dismiss the power of (ahem) alternative power.
For example, the Freedom Tower now under construction in NYC, USA will generate a significant amount of its own power. (as much as 20%!)
I'm a supporter of Nuclear technology, but only if it's open. The current "don't ask, don't tell" nuclear regime is stupid, stupid, stupid, and will never result in an industry that's truly safe. Nuclear technology should, like cryptography, be open, and should only be trusted when it's withstood significant, public, peer review.
Have you ever heard of Changing world technologies and their plans to convert garbage into crude oil? I've been following this one for about 2 years, and I think it's the "real deal". It's still in its infancy, but it's viable in many places now, today!
They're taking their time to refine things, and if I were them, I would, too. When I get the chance to invest in their technology, chances are, I will.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Point 2, that oil may be even more polluting, worth considering.
Point 1, bullshit. U238 with some U235 impurity is mined; 238 has a half life of 4.5 billion years; so it's not terribly radioactive, though not healthy either, mainly from the radon it breaks down to (as accumulates in cellars in some locations with granite containing some uranium). After fission we have a whole lot of short half-life, very active, highly poisonous isotopes. The activity goes down rapidly, but some, like plutonium has a half-life of about 250,000 years, so it will be a problem forever, in human terms. Not to mention the huge amount of low-level waste, from contaminated building materials, etc. Nuclear waste may be manageable, but it's not a trivial problem
Actually we just like to argue and call the other guy a numbskull. At least I think I read that in the FAQs someplace;)
Put me down for "all of the above", plus zero point vacuum energy and all the other schemes. I even think that has potential, along with atmospheric and ground based "natural" electricity. That's a biggee I never hear talked up and it should be. We are sitting on a huge spinning ball of molten iron that has a huge electromagnetic potential just hanging around mostly untapped, unlooked at, undiscussed. why I do not know. Maybe re-look at that, a la some tesla action.
I'm a "more power" kinda guy. We got new coal techniques that leave the coal underground and use this special bacteria to convert it to methane, easy to extract and pipe away and use in the existing natgas pipelines then. We got your nuclear batteries and somewhat better designed reactors. We got solar and wind (I got me some of that stuff). We got wood and cellulose to ethanol. We got algae that give off hydrogen gas. We got just using more insulation (still the best bang for the buck but not sexy enough to talk about usually). We got your geothermal. We got your biodiesel and making fuel from hemp a couple of ways. heck, for some cargo, they could bring back sailing ships with new dynaimc sailing designs for the long haul. Man, there's tons of solutions out there.
And so on and so forth and yada yada, I can probably rattle off another couple dozen if I think on it some and check a scosh and refresh me memories with google.
The energy solution is to use "all of the above" wherever it fits in the best. There is no one size fits all magic bullet solution. If tidal gennys work, I say throw em out there! We got umpteen millions of naked roofs with shingles rotting away on them, I say throw some solar PV up there, it'll add in. Stick a few megawatt wind gennys on every farms in the midwest, help the farmers out some and they help us out then, they got the land, we need the juice. Throw them tidal gennys off the coasts. Stick the hydropower back in and stop tearing down the old dams. Put the methane digesters in. Whatever. We been tallking about it too long.
The deal is, we can't wait for big money and bigger politics government to do all of it, we have it in our little grubby hands to all be part of producing energy, not just be total consumers and waste all our loot on stoopid toys and just kvetch about it all the time. I say it is every geeks civic duty to be the leader in their neighborhood and at least do something along these lines to get the ball rolling, just like we were the early adopters of computers and got that ball rolling.
You got "all the way" with making some energy personally, "part of the way" and "none of the way" to go with it. That's IT, three choices only that every geek gets to make on that question. "None of the way" is the only guaranteed "you fail it" selection, so everyone has a 2/3rds chance of making a correct decision..
Sure, we need the energy, but do we have to have these things up where they get in the way of the view?
"You can't have everything. Where would you keep it?" -- Steven Wright
One of the problems with solar energy is that its not constant.
Assume (roughly) 5 hours of effective sunlight each day. This will vary based on location, season, and climate. Google tells me that the average for Los Angelas is 5.5 hours/day. A location such as Hamburg, Germany, receives 2.5 hours. But lets be generous.
US uses about 10 billion KWH each day (according to google). Assuming that its evenly divided throughout the day, we need to store 7.5 billion KWH each day. Again, we are being generous: We should build a system that expects several cloudy days of winter throughout most of the country.
I want to see your proposal for a system that can generate over 2 billion KWH for each effective hour of sunlight a day, with a storage system that charges at the rate of 1.5 billion KWH and stores 7.5 billion KWH. (Note we are assuming 100% efficiency).
Then I want to see the KWH cost of solar when you are done. Average in the US is about $.075 KWH or so.
It would take a lot of effort to extract radioactive heavy metals from fly ash in any quantity - while the junk article seems to imply that fly ash is nuclear waste. Coal has its own problems as a fuel source without making things up.
It's funny, but people only believe nuclear is cost effective, clean or "green" in the USA. It appears that the advertising money must have been well spent. Bring on pebble bed, and maybe it will live up to the promise of being more than just the peaceful side of the bomb.
Back to tidal - it's often old technology that has been in use in large scale facilities for decades (it's just hydro in plants like the big one in France) - and the problem is finding somewhere with enough of a tidal difference close enough to populated areas which is not already built up. Wave power is based on a less dependable source, but it is easier to find a location.
People will start doing it when energy prices start going up. No one will do it for $20/year, unless either 1) they are so poor that $20/year means something for them, or 2) they are aware of the hidden environmental costs and care about such things.
IMHO, the best way would be to put all the costs in the final price. Make people pay for the true cost of energy and you'll see people worry about conservation.
They are convinced that nuclear power is unsafe, that radiation will kill us all, and they are playing a NIMBY game with nuclear waste disposal
You forgot to leave your address so we can send all the safe nuclear waste to your backyard - I'm assuming that the reference to "Not In My Back Yard" was an invitation to dump it in yours?
Sorry guys, it's still SF - but it may be worth building soon.
I think that underneath it all is the problem of long-term management.
People who are agin' nucular energy typically distrust the ability of governments or corporation to sucessfuly manage anything over a long term period eg decades or centuries.
This problem is exacerpated in the democratic world because more people just *know* that 10 years down the track (say) everyone in power is going to have different priorities and different plans and that the effort to change things to suit the latest corporate mission statement or political slogans will screw things up.
Therefore, ok perhaps a little subconsciously, people protest against nuclear power not because the technology is inherently unsafe but because the ability of modern society to manage long term projects end-to-end is *dismal*.
Truly *DISMAL*
Ergo nuclear technology, in the context of modern society, is dangerous.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Then the solution is simple!
All nuclear reactors should grind up their waste and send it up a stack. The NIMBY freaks have been fine with that method for ages!
Many years ago I was a proponent of nuclear energy. What convinced me to change my position? Simply put, I saw how nuclear power plant officials, government regulators, and industry consultants lied, over and over. When the Ginna nuclear power plant near Rochester NY had a serious accident, I listened to lie after lie from the official plant spokesmen. The story started out as "there is nothing wrong, this is a regularly scheduled test" and modified itself by the hour as the last hour's lie was exposed. I certainly have no reason to believe their final story, as I think it is more likely they just settled on a lie no one could expose.
My sister-in-law lives near the Hannaford nuclear facility and the lies continue to this day. The pattern: Reassuring lie, get caught, slight mea culpa, new lie. At least twice since I've been paying attention some official spokesman has declared that the mistakes of the past are gone and they will deal honestly and forthrightly from now on, and then been caught out in another cover-up within a year or two.
So could nuclear energy help us? Yes. Can we trust the people who control it today? Absolutely not.
Well if you're going "green", you won't use 4 televisions and 3 computers and 2 playstations and all that at the same time. Plus you'll buy things like LCD flatpanel monitors which require a lot less power than the CRTs.
Also, in theory if you are generating the electricity on premesis, you could power a lot of things with DC directly, instead of needing to convert it at the outlet. That would help some too, I imagine.
Some major flaws in your statements.
First item, You're comparing RAW HEAT energy consumption verses the nearly 100% usable electrical output of solar panels. Thermodynamics dictates that you'll never be able to convert more than 40% of that heat energy into electricity.
For example, Gas engines waste 80 to 90% BTU fuel content, Coal burning power stations 60%, Nukes waste 70%, and that's not even counting transmission losses. So you can start out by dividing the RAW factor by at least 4.
Second item, not all energy need be in electrical form. It makes no sense to convert sun-light into electricity just to heat water. Hot water solar panels can do this function quite nicely with average efficiencies exceeding 50%. Similarly, passive solar heating designs, (windows), can go a long way towards displacing fossil fuels used to heat homes.
No need to pave over vast stretches of land, plus you save on distribution costs.
What's also not mentioned is how much energy goes into mining, refining, and transporting all that energy.
I'll bet that we could mount solar panels on just a fraction of our combined roof area and end up supplying most of our energy needs.
Everybody saying that the nuclear power is the way to go, with only a few exceptions, is not mentioning the waste. What WILL we do with all that delicious fresh radioactive waste? Pile it up out back? Sure nuclear might be 'safe', and perhaps it is efficeint, and perhaps also 'green' in that it doesn't pollute the AIR, but the waste is a pretty big problem that needs to be addressed. Billy
For one I don't understand why so many people are for wind turbines. On top of taking up an immense amount of space and disrupting the area they are in, they also slaughter bird populations. A somewhat recent slashdot article also talked about research on how altering wind streams could affect the climate (particularly in Europe).
Coal is so horrible and filthy I don't even need to mention it. Solar is a wonderful concept and doesn't disrupt the environment in any way comparable to other sources, but I would wait for higher conversion efficiencies before implementing anything (which should happen soon).
Until then nuclear power is the way to go. Once we work through the politics involved they're are many technologies that have yet to be fully realized. Breeder reactors would supply the world's power at least long enough until fusion power is technologically feasible.
Actually, if you looked at your insulation/windows and replaced that 20 year old hot water heater, you'd probably save a lot more energy than the items you mentioned. Don't get me wrong, I fully support your ideas. As a father of 4 kids, I preach turning of lights/tv's radios, etc every day. But the fact remains that the vast majority of your electric bill comes from heating/cooling your air and your water.
You're right, I'm incredibly frightened of what could happen as a result of the burgeoning nuclear weapons arsenals in Finland and Sweden.
Wow, what a fair and balanced analogy.
Expensive compared to what available alternatives? Japan's large and abundant reserves of coal and natural gas? Their mighty rivers? Broad expanses of unpopulated land for wind and solar?
Unproven compared to what? LWR technology may not be the latest hot, new concept in power generation, but it has a lot of advantages... not the least of which is that it is fairly well proven. Improvements are possible, yes... but look at the improvements over the past twenty years. US plants are now running 90% of the time, unplanned shutdowns are at a very low level, planned outages now take two weeks instead of two months, personnel exposures and radwaste are at all-time lows... what else do you want, free milk and cookies?
Complex, but manageable. It also has the benefit of extremely low fuel, operation, and maintenance costs. Oh, and it's reliable baseload.
Yeah, concrete and steel are pretty exotic, and so expensive.
That depends on where and when the plant was built, and in comparison to the available alternatives at the time. If your benchmark is coal, then nuclear usually doesn't look so great economically. If your benchmark is wind or solar, then nuclear looks much better. Oh yeah, go talk to Finland about how terribly expensive nuclear is compared to the alternatives... maybe they'll decide not to build a new 1600 MWe reactor.
Actually, there is a big difference betweeen US and UK nuclear. In the UK, you have old Magnox plants operating at very high cost relative to average LWR technology used in the US and elsewhere. Magnox was basically the first generation of nuclear power technology, and a lot of its design was dictated by the desire to extract plutonium for weapons production. Then you have AGR, which appears to be very good technologically, but was eventually dropped in favour of LWR technology. So, in the end, the UK has just one fairly modern LWR at Sizewell B, and a bunch of old, expensive plants based on technology that nobody else is using.
Jimmy Carter was a nuclear engineer, and he was President, but to say he stopped all building of nuclear power plants in the US is simply false. Old plant orders were
Getting tired of Slashdot... moving to Usenet comp.misc for a while.
The common thread in most green power schemes is "efficiency doesn't matter because the energy is free..." Unfortunately, efficiency does matter because you have to pay for and maintain the equipment that captures the "free energy." The startup costs are high as are the ongoing expenses and in Otec's case, it didn't pencil out as a viable solution.
Hawaii ended up selling the cold seawater to aqua-culture firms that could sell farm grown abalone and lobster to the Japanese. The cold seawater is perfect for those folks and the profit margin on abalone, lobster and nori is much higher than it is on kilowatts.
This is true of any energy source. During the rolling-backout years in California a few years ago, my employer, stung by a couple of blackouts, bought their own natural gas powered generator. The next time there was a blackout, the automatic cutover didn't work, and time and data was still lost. It's not exactly straightforward to manage an electrical system, which accounts for part of the reason why we use centralized utilities.
That said, I accept the possibility that decentralized solar could work in many cases (just a small manner of programming and computers). But not everyone will have enough acreage to produce their own energy, nor will they live in high sunshine places, so the utility is always going to be necessary.
Here in Oregon, a place most people think of as perpetually overcast and raining, you can actually get about the same amount of energy from a PV cell as you would in New Mexico (averaged over the year), simply because it's cooler here and the efficiencies go up.
Hint -- if you're in the market for solar cells, try to get the ones which are made from reprocessed semiconductor waste. Semiconductor manufacture is a very dirty process (lots of nasty chemicals) so it's good to try to reduce the amount of waste, and reuse as much material as possible.
That article doesn't talk about any scientific, enviromental, or technical problems with nuclear power just political problems. Just because Bush likes nuclear power doesn't mean it's bad.
Also the artical is incorrect about natural gas as being cheap. The gas fueled units that the company for which I work cost about ten times as much as what nuclear power costs per MWh for a plant in a neighboring state. An example cost for a gas plant $70/MWh and coal plant is $15/MWh. I don't know how they consider that cheap. That's certainly not cheap of off-peak use. In fact, I don't know of any fuels currently used in large power plants that have a higher cost per MBTU than gas.
Oh, I read your whole sentence. The problem is that your claim glosses over a whole number of reasons why Japan, or any other nation without abundant local energy resources, might choose nuclear over other alternatives. Strategic concerns definitely contributed to the choice of nuclear, but that doesn't mean it was the only reason.
Um, cost comparison is not usually the primary indicator of whether a technology is proven or not. However, if you insist on break-even, I can point to several proven (your definition) US plants constructed prior to the regulatory meltdown that occurred in the mid to late 70s.
Wow, are you sure about that? It sure seemed like magic to me when I was working on my Master's degree in nuclear engineering, or when I was writing codes to calculate neutron flux distributions in nuclear fuel assemblies, or when I was a reactor engineer telling operators which control rods to pull during startups. It must be magic, 'cause that math stuff is hard!
Concrete and plain carbon or stainless steel are used all over a nuclear plant... yes, even for containment. Granted, "fuel rod casings" are generally made of zircaloy, but are generally not that complicated based on the fuel rods I have seen put together and those that I have actually handled during new fuel inspections. Oh, by the way, there aren't that many sodium cooled reactors around.
Oh, the capital cost is expensive? I never would have guessed. I mean, I've only been working in the industry for 11 years, and have only been involved in the construction work for two major nuclear refurbishment projects. What do I know?
By the way, I'd love some citations regarding this sale of material for weapons production. Please note that I'm talking about US commercial nuclear plants here.
In one short phrase... the rush to natural gas. Gas prices were low, and new technology became available to burn it very efficiently. Ten years ago, putting up a natural-gas fired merchant power plant was almost a no-brainer, financially. Today, you have to think a little harder. As gas prices go up, the pressure to find an alternative increases. That's one major reason that nuclear hasn't been of major political interest until the past couple years.
Hey, I was just responding to an anti-nuclear troll post that contained a lot of inaccurate statements. I'm apparently doing it again.
Getting tired of Slashdot... moving to Usenet comp.misc for a while.