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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.
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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It'll be a barrier to coastal erosion which badly effects some parts of the world.
Wave power is a total ridiculosity - you want to sacrifice TWENTY FOUR PERCENT of US coastline in order to supply SEVEN PERCENT of the electricity.
:)
This is our electricity usage BEFORE we tack on the electricity used to power our hydrogen cars, which will raise our consumption an order of magnitude.
Using algal biodiesel, breeder fission(with development on fusion), and wind where suitable, are the only remotely practical eco-friendly choices that are sustainable - Photovoltaic trumps them all, but to convert even just our current electrical needs to photovoltaic would cost more than we've spent on imported oil since we started importing oil. We could create an infrastructure to supply the entire nation's demand for fuel with algal biodiesel on an amount of money that's similar to what we spend anually on importing oil, which is coincidentally about the same amount of money it would cost to install a single hydrogen pump at every gas station in the US.
Wave power is and has always been a crock as an energy scheme.
whoops, forgot to log in
People in Soviet Russia, however, appear to be afflicted with amusing juxtapositions of the aforementioned situation
Yes, tidal forces DO cause the earth's rotation to slow down.
The tidal forces created by the earth on the moon have slowed the rotation of the moon down to the point that we only see one side of the moon. That is, the moon rotates about once a month. Similarly, the tidal forces of the moon are slowing the earth's rotation down, and it will eventually reach one about one rotation per month also. Assuming that the sun doesn't become a red giant first. And, speaking of the sun, there is also a tidal force that from the sun that will eventually cause the earth to rotate once per year. I'm not sure who this conflict between the moon's and the sun's tidal forces work out.
Conservation of angular momentum means that the tidal forces are causing the moon to orbit the earth faster, and thus further away.
While all these tidal forces are very small and only add up over very long periods of time, they can be measured. In particular, things like variations of the amount of snow on mountains, the amount of water in man-made lakes, the force of huricanes, and variations in the shape of the earth caused by earthquakes all add up to enough to cause the need for leap seconds.
Leap years keep the seasons from rotating through the calendar. Leap seconds keep the zenith of the sun ("noon") from rotating through the day. I forget the exact value, but there is something like an accumulated 20-30 seconds difference caused by these forces over the last 50 years, and therefore there have been 20-30 leap seconds added since then.
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How viable is solar power? I was asking myself this question and here's the numbers I came up with.
In 2001 the USA used 96275 trillion BTUs of energy that year. This comes to 3.22 trillion watts.
Now there are about 295 million people in the US, so this comes to about 11Kw per person at any given time.
This means each person uses is responsible for 262 Kwh of power per day.
Now lets say that square meter of sunlight provides 1 kw of energy on average and the average area gets 5 good hours of sunlight per day. Looking at this chart, you can see that this assumption isn't too far off.
The typical solar panel is about 30% efficient. This means that for every square meter of solar panel would render 1.5 KwH every day.
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!
If every person in the united states of America put up solar panels. We would have over 51 billion square meters of panel, that's close to 20,000 square miles of panel or the equivalent of covering most of over in panels.
Now these numbers account for all energy used both domestic, industrial, and exported. Also these numbers do not account for the added or lost efficiency of converting systems over to pure electrical power as opposed to other energy processes like those used in the internal combustion engine.
I left the links to my math in just incase I botched anything.
That even when a totally non-CO2 emitting, non-radioactive power source is found we still get the "OMG!! It's could cause xxx", uproar.
Living here in the post-industrial wonderland of NJ, I find this amusing in a bad way.
The other thing that shocked me was the supposedly "higher" costs for "green" energy. Bad news folks, it's lower than what I pay to Conectiv/Pepco.
And now back to our regular insomnia...
For those who want more, the best links on for intelligent green reading:
WorldChanging.com -- which also has an article about wave power.
TreeHugger, which is already linked in the story.
Dave Pollard, which writes very insightfully about lots of things including environmental philosophy.
Green Car Congress, where you can get the best news about green mobility, cool cars & industrial developments.
IDFuel, which is more about design but covers some of the same ground as TreeHugger.com
FuelCellWorks for all the latest news about fuel cells.
Grist Magazine, for news and a touch of humor, plus lots of interviews.
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
The main advantages that nuclear has over solar, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal, and tidal:
This is a biggie. We know how to build nuclear power plants. Other countries have been doing so for years. Even in the US, nuclear is a proven energy source: IIRC, the US derives 24% of its electricity from nuclear power.
Look at how much energy the US uses now, and how much the US predicts it will be using. Can solar cells, wind farms, hydroelectric, or tidal replace that? It doesn't seem that wind nor solar can -- it doesn't have the capacity nor the constant power generation. Hydroelectric isn't unlimited either: sooner or later you run out of damnable rivers. Geothermal? It seems location dependent (but I'll admit, I haven't done my homework on this one). Tidal? How much coastline would we need again?
Hydroelectric power creates lakes and turns rivers into streams. It changes aquatic ecosystems. How about tidal? How many shorelines are we going to line with tidal energy power generation? What do you think that will do to the environment? (Wind power is also relatively non-disruptive.)
Nuclear has been competing with traditional electric generation for decades. We know we can generate nuclear power at a relatively low cost. The same can't be said for many other alternative energy sources.
Effective at limiting pollution.
No matter what "green" energy we use, there will be pollution. Check out the byproducts created in the manufacture of solar cells. Yes, nuclear does require some mining, and it requires proper disposal of nuclear waste. Yet, in the end, nuclear is amazingly efficient at eliminating greenhouse gases on a level with other green technologies.
So, lets sum up - Nuclear is:
Perhaps this is why noted scientists such as James Lovelock also advocate nuclear power.
The main problem is the public and the greens. 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.
To be honest, nuclear power isn't my first choice for green energy: That would be orbital space platforms harvesting the energy of the sun, or fusion reactors. Perhaps one day, those technologies would be feasible. Right now, they are slightly more of a pipe dream than other green energy. Nuclear exists now, and it works. Conservation goes only so far -- the third world is slowly turning first world, and that will require an enormous consumption of energy.
We need to be realistic about our energy problem and about what solutions will work. Most alternative energy sources won't work right now. Nuclear will.
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!
Waves are cool, but don't forget ... OTEC (Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion)
My father was a primary designer on this, so I had the "real scoop" on what was going on there in real time, it was real exciting stuff back then!
Mini-OTEC, 1979
In 1979, the first successful at-sea, closed-cycle OTEC operation in the world was conducted aboard the Mini-OTEC, a converted Navy barge operating in waters off Keahole Point.
This plant operated for three months, from August-October 1979, and generated approximately 50 kilowatts of gross power with net power ranging from 10-17 kilowatts.
Its turbine generator produced a gross output of up to 55 kW. About 40 kW were required to pump up 2,700 gallons/min of 42F water from 2200-ft depth through a 24-in diameter polyethylene pipe and an additional 2,700 gallons/min of 79F surface water, leaving a maximum net power output of 15 kW.
This was a joint effort by the State of Hawaii and a private industrial partner.
More linkage: NREL's OTEC site
Google
It's effect of ocean life (and the planet in general) is microscopic, infinitesimal, compared to the effect of the coal plants and other brown and black energy sources.
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.
Wind power is also relatively non-disruptive I used to live near a wind turbine that is on the outskirts of a medium sized wind farm. They are the most disruptive energy producers I can think of to be near in terms of effect on people (and possibly animals). The low frequency noise produced by the machine played havoc on sleep (you got none) and can drive you to the point that you think of any stupid excuse not to go home. I had to sell up and move, it had got so bad, due to the fact it was starting to effect every part of my personal and professional life from sleep deprevation and stress. I realise you were referring to the environment, but some of these 'green' solutions to power generation produce an effect to its surrounds other than what is normally addressed when their impact is reviewed. Wind power is often viewed, here at least, to be one of the most cleanest methods of producing energy and I believe that to be true.....as long as you don't live near them.
And no, I couldn't give a shit what my karma is.
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
Good article on Wired about a safe way to do Nuclear power. Still need to get rid of the waste, but at least meltdowns wouldn't be a problem.
We've missed out on a lot by not developong nuclear plants over the last 25 years. As other posters have said, its here now, and its the cleanest we have.
Spencer Ogden
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
Wait a second.
Article summary: "Nuclear is a bad idea because a lot of nuclear plants are getting old and will need to be replaced. Also, if everyone had solar and wind and personal gas turbines, we wouldn't need nuclear. Oh yeah, and politicians are evil and trying to exploit this for their own benefit."
(1) Those nuclear plants are getting old anyway, and will need to be replaced anyway. That has nothing to do with what they're going to be replaced with.
(2) Not everyone does have those, and I rather doubt everyone's going to suddenly buy those. Great idea for new houses, lousy idea for existing ones.
(3) And there aren't any politicians trying to make a fast buck off green power either? That's practically what a politician's job *is*.
Where's the section that looks at a realistic breakdown of realistic costs and goals? Where's the section that makes any attempt to compare the two besides "hey! look! NUCLEAR POWER ISN'T PERFECT!"
-1, flamebait.
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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.
There is one alternative that is fully sustainable and has been working economically for decades. Brazil has been producing ethanol powered cars for 25 years. Every gas station in Brazil sells straight ethanol at a lower price than gasoline. Although the proportion is lower now, in the 1980's about 90% of the cars in Brazil were powered by straight ethanol, and the rest used a 75%/25% mix of gasoline and ethanol. Today several models of cars in Brazil come with "flex power" motors, which can burn any proportion of ethanol/gasoline mix.
The Brazilian alcohol program is the largest renewable energy program for cars in the world. The only reason why it has been pulled back a little is because the oil prices aren't as high now as in 1980, after you take inflation into account. Also, the whole country has a much better economical situation, with a lower debt, internal oil production is higher and world sugar prices are higher (Brazilian ethanol is made from sugar cane). All these factors have contributed to decrease the proportion of ethanol in the total fuel consumption in Brazil, but ethanol is the first and most viable alternative for renewable transportation fuel in the world.
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.
We know it's the future.
...
... done before going to Mars, for comparable price ...
... how? Guesswork?
A lot of us certainly hope it is.
We know with adequate research spending it can be achieved
Ahem. We know no such thing. Not in an engineering and economic sense. Certainly we have proven we can achieve fusion reactions in the lab; this has been done for many years now; but we just don't know if we'll ever be able to make sustained and safe reactions which have a high enough energy return to be worth doing. And yes, cost matters. If it bankrupts the entire world to make enough energy to run one town for a year, that would not help anyone, even the one town, because it would be the planetary end of civilization.
It can be
Oh really. And you know this
I am a big proponent of trying A LOT harder and more urgently to perfect fusion power, but let's have a little realism here.
http://www.jc-solarhomes.com/solar_energy_facts.ht m
Assume each square metre can receives 1 KW hr per hr. Assume 20% efficiency for photovoltaics. So 0.2 KW hr per hr per metre.
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0001729.html says a kw hour is 3412 BTUs, so photo voltaics produce 0.2 * 3412 = 682.4 BTU/hr per square metre.
http://energy.cr.usgs.gov/energy/stats_ctry/Stat1. html
says the 1998 U.S. energy consumption was about 94 quadrillion BTUs
Assumong 8 * 365 hours of decent sunshine in the desert year around.
So that's 100 * 10^15 / (8 * 365 ) = 34 * 10^12 BTUs/sunshine hour.
(34 * 10^12 ) / (682.4 ) = 49 * 10^9 square metres = 49 * 10^9 / 10^6 = 49000 square kilometres = 223 KM by 223 KM or 140 miles by 140 miles.
If you "want" the entire world to consume energy at per-capita rates like the USA, then assuming the US population is 300M, and the world population is 6B, then 6*10^9/(300*10^6) * 49000 = 980000 square km. The Earth's land surface area is claimed to be 148,300,000 sq km, so 980000 / 148300000 = .006608 or less than 1% of the Earth's land surface area.
Mind you, for infrastructure that huge, you have to build roads, support buldings, etc. So even if a factor of 3 off, that's still about 2% of the surface area.
Also, once demand for photovoltaics reached 1% of the above, I imagine the industry would drive efficiency from 20% to higher levels. So 1/3 of the land surface area is way too high.
The real problem with photovoltaics is the cost. http://store.yahoo.com/sancor/50w.html will sell you a 502mm x 939mm panel for $588, or 588 / (502 * 939) * 1000000 = $1247 per sq metre. Let's be hopeful that in quantity, wholesale lots, we could buy this for $1000 per sq metre. 980000 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000 = $980 trillion. Note that the annual GDP for Earth, according to http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/print /xx.html
is $51.48 trillion. That figure is at purchasing
power parity. I'll leave it others to speculate
whether photovoltaics can be manufactured cheaper
in third world countries or not. If you don't think so, then considering that the U.S. economy
is about $11 trillion, and that it is blamed for consuming about 1/2 the world's resources, the non purchasing power parity world GDP is probably closer to $22 trillion.
There needs to be a 10X reduction in the price/energy ratio of photovoltaics. Do that, i.e. reduce the cost of the solar energy to meet the world's needs to an investment of about $100 trillion, amortize it over 30 years, and I'm sure we can find the money and land to do this.
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.
This is a myth. Funny how old myths refuse to die. Energy Payback Time is in the order of 1-2 years these days, and then will run efficiently for 10-20 years.
h tm l
http://www.otherpower.com/otherpower_solar_new.
Solar cells are not just "batteries" and have not been for a very long time.
Surur
Information is the location of things. Computation is moving things around.
Just FYI...
Lithuania gets 86% of electricity from nuclear power. France gets 78%. Belgium gets 57%. Sweden gets 52%. Switzerland and Slovakia get 45%. Ukraine gets 44%. Germany gets 29%. Japan gets 28%. The UK gets 23%.
The US only gets 20% of electricity from nuclear.
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.