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'No Quick Fix' From Nuclear Power
humoly writes to tell us BBC News is reporting that while many are calling for nuclear power, new nuclear plants are not the answer to combating climate changes or the wavering energy concerns for the UK. From the article: "The Sustainable Development Commission (SDC) report says doubling nuclear capacity would make only a small impact on reducing carbon emissions by 2035. The body, which advises the government on the environment, says this must be set against the potential risks. The government is currently undertaking a review of Britain's energy needs."
While I am a fan of alternatives, the problems for alternatives is that stable power plants are built to handle the worst loads. That is, when you design your grid and your sources, you use the dependable sources as the figuring of the input energy. Well, we may add more alternatives, but we still need to increasethe plants that can be counted on. Why? Because almost all energy is at the whim of mother earth. Of course, there is tidal, geothermal, and hydro available, which can be counted on. But most of the alternatives showing a great deal of promise are in wind and solar. They can NOT be counted on. So until a good viable way to capture the excess energy is created (hydrogen is a LONG ways off), then we will have to use on the normal types (coal, oil, gas, and nukes).
And personally, I think that Nukes is about the only good choice left.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I agree with your sentiment.
I spent the first twelve years of my adult life working next to, sleeping next to etc... a nuclear power plant on a US Navy submarine.
Nuclear power is incredibly safe in the First world, I do worry about the soviet union, Iran etc. managing power plants... But the US at least, And I am sure France and England do a great job of managing nuclear power plants of all types.
Nuclear power is the cleanest, safest and most economical form of electrial generation we currently have.
With the current trend for Hybrid and even electric cars, and a steady stream of new nuclear power plants I think our future enviromentally is more bright than the nay-sayers would ever dream.
Nuclear power isn't a fix because it just won't scale and causes pollution in other ways such as in radioactive waste. Energy researcher Dr. Nathan Lewis of Caltech and perhaps many others in the industry have already estimated that in order to even become close to the approx. 13 terawatt energy that the world is using every year, "producing 10 TW of power would require construction of 10,000 new nuclear power plants over the next 50 years, i.e., one every other day somewhere in the world for the next 50 years." Considering the fact that getting even one nuclear power plant built takes years, nuclear power does not look optimal.
However, about "1.2x105 TW of solar energy" hits the Earth's surface, and from "50 TW to optimistic estimates of 1500 TW" can be harvested each year. Therefore, solar energy is our best chance at meeting our energy needs.
But two of the biggest factors in holding this technology back is the increase in efficiency of solar cells, and solar energy conversion/storage (into a fuel).
Unfortunately, as they point out, instead of resulting in a decrease in carbon use, what it might do is simply give people the ability to blithely continue the current climb in power usage (i.e. no real decrease in carbon emissions). Worse yet: knowing that an increase in power capacity, people might just continue increasing their power usage, rather than holding back in the knowledge that a wall was up ahead (i.e. the result would be (at least in the short term) an increase in carbon emissions.
And, on top of that, a massive increase in nuclear power would have notable structural and political downsides.
It's nice when the answers in life are simple, but it's rare.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
Electric cars certainly produce less particulates against ICE cars. coal power stations go to a lot of trouble to remove particulates.
As for CO2, a coal powerstation is about 35% efficient at converting C to electricity, a LiIon battery is about 80% efficient round trip, and electric transmissions are about 90% efficient. The overall efficiency is thus about 25% C to miles.
ICE engines are on average about 15% efficient at converting C into miles.
Plug in hybrids probably make more sense.
Yeah, I'm with you there.
Next time I run down to the store to pick up a new computer, I'll bring in back home on my bike. Of course, it won't be in a box, so I'll take a blanket with me to the store to wrap it in for safety.
And, when I go for additional RAM, NATs, graphics boards, etc., I'll bring my own anti-static bags.
And then there's the candy and cookies for the kids. Buy in bulk or make our own, and when we take it with us we'll re-use baggies. Or wrap it in leaves.
Of course, since we'll be changing our suburban lifestyle, we won't be taking the kids to piano lessons all the time, that's less auto usage and less need for candy or cookies or other junk the can get quick energy on the road from. (On the other hand, if they are riding bicycles, they need more energy.)
Actually, this is not so much sarcasm as it might appear. I actually picked up my last sempron box with LCD monitor in Mikage, carried the bundle back to the train on foot (about a mile and a half if I remember right), and carried it from the local train station to home on the back of my bike.
My back was a little sore for a couple of days -- should have borrowed one of those wire-frame luggage carriers or something.
And my wife already does a lot of making and/or packaging her own quick food for the kids. Got to give her more credit for that.
From the article, these are the five major disadvantages identified by the CDC:
* No long-term solutions for the storage of nuclear waste are yet available, says the SDC, and storage presents clear safety issues
* The economics of nuclear new-build are highly uncertain, according to the report
* Nuclear would lock the UK into a centralised energy distribution system for the next 50 years when more flexible distribution options are becoming available
* The report claims that nuclear would undermine the drive for greater energy efficiency
* If the UK brings forward a new nuclear programme, it becomes more difficult to deny other countries the same technology, the SDC claims (emphasis mine)
While the first four are significant, the last one is an interesting angle I hadn't considered. If going nuclear becomes the model for leading first world countries, second and third one countries are going to demand the technology in order to follow the dominant pattern. If they're refused it, they'll probably feel very littlle remorse in cranking up their fossil fuel plants and polluting like elephants with dysentary in order to set up a little environmental blackmail. If every tinpot dictator is given nuclear tech, the chances of someone turning Manhatten or heaven forfend, downtown Vancouver into a radioactive cloud go up dramatically. Just on that point alone, it seems like going nuclear would only buy a respite of a few decades before the energy squeeze moves further down the chain and gifts us with a whole new set of problems.
an idiot, I was referring to people doing things like say walking more often and not doing things like driving their car to their mailbox, rather than walk to it, like my old cul-de-sac neighbors.
What oil crisis?
Oil today (NYMEX): $61.47/bbl.
These are one-time improvements. A growth rate of 2% will double in 35 years. If England is growing at 2% a year, then doubling the gas mileage simply puts the problem off 35 years. Oil will have peaked in 35 years (probably sooner..) The first doubling of gas mileage may be easy, but each succesive doubling gets exponentially harder. It can't keep up.
The same logic goes for better insulation and efficient lightbulbs. Conservation and better efficiency are not long term solutions, practically they just break even for a little while.
One possible exception to this: Germany and other parts of Europe no longer have replacement birthrates. This means without immigration they are not growing. If England can achieve this, and ban immigration, and go carbon neutral by conservation, then - for england - they are done. As a practical matter they would also be on their way to extinction.
If the global warming crowd is roughly correct, and we have just a decade or two to significantly reduce CO2 emmisions (or face global catastrophy), then, since we have a [1]global growth rate of more than 2%, we have about that much time to come up with carbon neutral energy sources, - in excess of what we already have - that equal roughly double our current fossil fuel sources. All of them. Coal, Oil, rain forests (that we do not replace) ...
I see no way to do this without a huge increase in nuclear, or possibly carbon sequestration on coal, and this on top of lots of wind solar and biomass. Greater efficiency? One quarter energy use on everything, at a minimum, and then we have to have some alternatives coming online in 20 years or we just put off the problem, and not even long enough to pass it on to our kids.
[1] If nobody grew at all except China, we would still have greater than 1% per year growth. 2% is low for most places outside of western europe.
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
O.k. So I didn't read the report only the article so take this for what it's worth. But based on the article it seems this 'SDC' group has a definite axe to grind with regards to Nuclear Power. Given that one of their objections is that "Reliance on Nuclear Power would reduce the push for conservation"(or some such). I have to say "Huh?". There is nothing magical about Nuclear Power that forces people to use it without regard to waste! It can be conserved just like anything else. It's obvious on it's face and a seemingly intelligent group of people would know this. I think they probably do and yet allow such drivel in their report specifically because they don't want Nuclear Power to succeed.
It becomes more obvious when I consider the research I've done locally. I live in Canada and know for a fact that replacing the Electricity generation plants in Alberta & Saskatchewan with Nuclear would provide approximately 41% of Canada's Kyoto requirements. Different measure I know(e.g. the article is referring to Britain & goals for 2035), but this 41% isn't "insignificant". Further it comes from only 2 provinces with approximately 4 Million of Canada's 30 million people.
Than if you get in to the possibilities of electricity generation growing drastically to support electric/fuel cell vehicles. The reductions in CO2 are potentially enormous. Yes renewables may provide support here too but Nuclear is a largely known and viable option right now provided public perceptions(and that's all they are) were changed.
The "cost effectiveness" of Nuclear Power is largely due to the over burdensome "environmental" regulations generally applied to them as opposed to almost all other forms of large energy production. Some of these regulations are required, but too often the case has been that one review after another delays the building of plants at enormous cost to investors.
In other words I find that by reading between the lines of the article that this SDC group is deliberately being obtuse and deliberately trying to sabotage the new push to use Nuclear Energy. This is counter productive if they are really trying to solve the world's Global Warming "problem".
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/nuclea r-faq.html
Electric cars that have been put out have ranges of about 100 miles, which is plenty for most people's weekly commutes. Part of the problem, though, was that it was just relocating the pollution - instead of it coming out of your tailpipe, it was coming out of a coal power plant. Nuclear power makes that go away completely.
Nuclear power + electric commuter cars = far less carbon emissions. I'm sure many people would buy a reasonably-priced electric car as a daily driver nowadays if it were marketed well enough (and have a second gas-powered car for longer trips).
doubling nuclear capacity would make only a small impact on reducing carbon emissions by 2035
Doubling Hybrid and electric car use would make only a small impact on reducing carbon emissions by 2035.
There you go, some perspective.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
Ok, you haven't addressed my remark that heating is more important than electricity, but let me give you some things to think about regarding decentralised electricity, for example.
PVs are probably a red herring. They are all made by oil companies, so even were they viable, the oil companies will keep them at a price to maintain the oil demand. I have never advocated PVs in this discussion.
Batteries are also a red herring. If our demand were just lights and electronic devices we could supply everyone in the US using wind and hydro alone. The problem is mainly heating. Our house doesn't need any heating (due to our comfortable climate) and our power bill is about 2.5kWh per day. And I work from home. That works out to an average of about 100W continuous, so the US and canada would need, at that power level, about 24GW of generation capacity. "Hydro-Québec is the world's largest hydroelectric generating company, with a total installed capacity (2005) of 31,512 MW"
So hydro alone could provide all the real electricity needs of houses in the US and canada. Why isn't this enough in practice? Because despite the fact that 100% solar heating of houses as far north as alaska is practical, maybe 0.1% of domestic heating is provided by solar. Similarly, americans throw away 84% of Al drink cans, requiring 20 times more electrical energy than to recycle them (including the fuel to pick up the cans etc).
So forget about electricity. Lets talk about heat. lets say you live in gloomsville, with no sun (perhaps due to being built in a canyon). How could you heat your house more efficiently? Using a cogeneration system would produce 1J of electricity and 4J of heat for every 5J of fuel used. Compare this to people using resistance heating in their houses, which produce 1J of heat for every 3J of nuclear fuel. If you generate electricity in a nuclear plant you will rarely get more than about 35% of the energy released usable as electricity, and you lose more carrying that energy to the house.
So, yes, a larger generator may have a higher carnot efficiency (you missed some issues, incidently, the MPT efficiency of a large heat exchanger is higher than a small one, and losses due to surface area are much higher in smaller engines). But a local generator produces heat where it is used, rather than very inefficiently moving it around the countryside.
Some other advantages of decentralised power including redundancy and availability (which you touched on), demand scaling, more rapid efficiency improvements due to smaller devices (there is a reason why prius car batteries are made using NiMH C cells - the huge consumer demand means the techonology is a lot more refined), ability to use small scale power (wood fired diesel engine perhaps?) and reduction in transmission losses.
Centralised electrical power is very 19th century, and perhaps should go the same way as centralised computing, centralised networking, centralised transport etc. There is so much stuff we can do, but the people who have the keys to the power stations and oil pumps don't want us to think about them.
Show me a wind farm that produces emissions
That didn't really make sense. But I'm going to post it anyway.
* Switch light bulbs for fluorescent bulbs
... turn bulb off when not in use. Perhaps even use motion sensors to automatically shut off lights in unused rooms. An incandescent bulb switched off burns less energy than a flourescent in an unused but still on flourescent.
;) only smaller). There are, however, a few consumer electronics devices that do have a legitamte (i.e. real) standby mode and shuttung them off would be mostly pointless. For example, DVR systems. Put them in standby and they stay in low power mode until they need to record something. Turn it *off* (if possible) and you have just eliminated about 80% of the purpose and use of the DVR.
.06*3=.18Kw-hours per day to .03. Sounds huge right? Wrong. If you pay 7 cents per KW-hour how much money have you saved from usage if that bulb is on 3hours/day for 30 days? hmmm 37.8 cents verus 6.3 cents. So you saved 32 cents. If that bulb lasts you 6 months your energy savings would be $1.92. If it lasted 6 months. In my experience, I've not found any brand that outlasted the incandescents. Given the higher price of the flourescents vs. incandescents, most of them have been more costly. Which means more trips to the store for replacements. And all this assumes you don't dim the incandescents appropriately. If you do this the savings difference shrinks. What about on a total energy scale? If say 50 million bulbs saved .15Kw/month that would
Or even better: use dimmer switches and
* Replace bulky monitors for flat screens
Too minor (see below). Now, change out all the CRT Television screens and you've got something.
* Incentivate low-power CPU's
One word: Cell. Again though, this won't matter much since outside the Linux world (i.e. most people) PCs get shut off for most of the day.
* Invest in information campaigns about not using home electronics in stand-by mode
You clearly did not get the memo. Today's standard "standby" mode is the same thing we used to call "off". The only difference is that now there is an annoying-ass red LED sitting there staring at your reminding you that you are not using the device. And burning a small amount of energy (heh, think the ol' "half cent rounding" scenarios
* Invest in solar power R&D for home applications
Already been done. Been going on for decades. It is mostly a money pit. Unless you plan to rebuild nearly every house (uhhh for the momennt leave out the gulf coast states where they pretty much ARE doing that...) so you can orient them properly and provide "solar envelopes" to prevent my neighbor's trees (you know, good environmental things to have) from blocking my access to power for my fridge, there is not a lot of potential here. All this despite a butt-load of money doing exactly what you propose.
A more realistic alternative would be simple education of what you are using. In real time. Honestly that little statement you get with your power bill every month, if you even read it, is pointless for monitoring your electricity usage. It's rather like the old Yakoff Smirnoff bit: "I saw an ad that said 'big sale (pause) last week'. I thought to myself 'oh sure, rub it in why don't you'".
Instead have realtime feedback on how much power you draw. Then people will actually get curious and many (particularly we hacker-types) will experiment with their "new toy". They'll turn off lights, turn certain devices on, etc. just to see what does what. I think many would be very suprised.
Not the least of which would be all the people changing all their bulbs to flourescents. The only time you see any real (read: significant) savings (money or energy) is when you change out a bulb that is on for a sizable portion of the day. Ever price what it takes to run a 60 watt bulb for three hours a day in your area? How about a 10W flourescent?
In that scenario (far more common than you may at first think), you go from using
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
The only way to really solve this problem is to stop wasting energy. The way to think about this is: if you have to live with using only 5% of the energy that you use now, what will you choose to use it on? Take it as a thought experiment - you're not allowed to invent ways to produce your own energy; assume that this has already been done. So what will you keep? A car? Your fridge? Your computer? How about not buying stuff that comes in unnecessary packaging? Avoiding ready made meals, drinks, snacks etc?
Perhaps 5% is not what we will have to live with in the future, it could be more or less, but I suspect it won't be far off at least for our children.
We need to get off planet and set up solar collectors in space which transfer their energy to a power station in a geostable orbit around the earth, which transfers the energy to a power station on the equator, which feeds it into the global grid. [...] Practically limitless power.
You're mostly right, but there's a limit to how much power you really want to get this way, though. That's because our little warming problem won't be exactly solved (only delayed) since our planet can only radiate the industrial process waste heat away so much/so fast before becoming too hot to live on.
The final solution would be to move the entire industry in space too, not just the power generating facilities.
(quick computation shows that with approx. 500 billion square kilometers of solar panels running at 50% efficiency you could (theoretically) generate enough power to make the whole earth glow brighter than the sun)
Ahh the joys of all them taxes and regulatory fees simply for being hooked up. And being hooked up is mandatory in most places. Go figure.
Forget environmental concerns... When oil becomes scarce [Or when people think it has], what will happen?
Nothing. It'll be a page 45 blurb in the NYT. Why? By the time that happens pretty much nobody will be using it. i twill be a footnote in history.
There is more oil in North America than most ever people dream of.
That is a damned lot of oil. And yes, it can be economically "produced" at today's rates, enough for several hundred years of oil use. It's politics that prevent it.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
I don't think I've yet seen definitive proof that solar power is renewable. That may sound absurd, but it takes a lot of power to get all the raw materials, transport them to the manufacturing plant, build a solar panel, ship them to distrubution areas, carry them home, install them, etc. Is the lifetime power output of a solar panel really greater than the energy expenditure to build it? And how much pollution does the manufacturing process create? Some of the materials in some solar panels sound a little toxic.
Anyway, ethanol is essentially solar power, but it is only energy-positive if it's used locally. I'm curious to see what solar panels yield in a full lifecycle analysis.
E pluribus unum