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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?
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.
...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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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
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