World's First Molten-Salt Solar Plant Opens

An anonymous reader writes "Sicily has just announced the opening of the world's first concentrated solar power (CSP) facility that uses molten salt as a heat collection medium. Since molten salt is able to reach very high temperatures (over 1000 degrees Fahrenheit) and can hold more heat than the synthetic oil used in other CSP plants, the plant is able to continue to produce electricity long after the sun has gone down. The Archimede plant has a capacity of 5 megawatts with a field of 30,000 square meters of mirrors and more than 3 miles of heat collecting piping for the molten salt. The cost for this initial plant was around 60 million Euros."

Comments

Already done?

[Anonymous Coward]

Um what? I swear I saw a documentary about a US plant which did the same thing (even looks the same) and that was years ago.

Re:Already done?

[Xandar01]

This one doesn't use salt, but we have had one very similar built here back in 2008. http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2010/07/areva-boosts-solar-supersteam-parameters-in-bakersfield

Re:Already done?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm with this guy. Reading Rainbow or 3-2-1 Contact or Mr. Wizard or something like that did a significant piece on Solar One near Barstow, CA which covered the molten salt technology.

Re:Already done?

[Anonymous Coward]

Parent here, I think Bakersfield was the one I was referring to but I thought they said they switched molten salt because I remember them talking about having to ensure they maintain the temperature of the salt so it didn't harden and clog the pipes.

Re:Already done?

[Benaiah]

5MW? Its sad that one HV pump on a process plant will use all of this. Miners should really have to purchase some of their power from renewable energy. It will stop them(us) from blatantly wasting power because its cheap.

Re:Already done?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is that sad? How much energy should such a pump use be using so that none is wasted?

Re:Already done?

[TapeCutter]

A 5MW windmill can be up and running for about 1.5M euros, but a pilot plant such as the one in TFA does not have the same goals as a commercial plant.

Re:Already done?

[Forge]

Do you mean the one mentioned in the middle of this article

"Molten salts have been used in many industries as a high temperature heat transfer medium. The 'highest profile' use of molten salts in this regard is the Solar Power Tower near Dagget, California (excuse the pun). It uses a Sodium Nitrite/Nitrate mixture to absorb and store the sun's heat from the focus of many mirrors in the desert upon a central tower. The heat from the salt is then transfered via a heat exchanger to produce steam to drive a conventional steam turbine and generator to produce electricity from the sun for Southern California.3a"

"Last modified, 20 Nov 97"

Re:Already done?

[CarpetShark]

I swear I saw a documentary about a US plant which did the same thing

Yes, but that plant was indoors.

Re:Already done?

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

Someone needs to explain me how you can create 5 megawatts with only 30.000 square meters. That would make the plant produce 160 Watts/sq. meter on average.

Theoretical maximum efficiency for any kind of solar plant (on the equator) is less than 200 Watts per square meter (to give you an idea, in southern florida it drops below 150, and this is north of florida). That would make this plant over 120% efficient (at least).

Unless, of course, you know, they're lying and it's like 5 megawatts peak capacity at 12h noon at that optimal day in spring when the sun is directly overhead for its longest period, and only counting the total energy circulating in the plant, not what's actually coming out to the grid, which should be a bit under 2/3rd of that, or, say 3.8 megawatts. And 3, at best, during winter.

Re:Already done?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.sandia.gov/csp/cspoverview.html
Yep.

Re:Already done?

[confused one]

Then you must know that solar plants are often stated to have a rating which is at peak output. And by peak I mean maximum you'll ever see on the ideal day in the ideal weather. For that matter, so is any other power plant -- the nameplate output is peak, not average.

Re:Already done?

[petermgreen]

the nameplate output is peak, not average.
The difference is for conventional power plants the nameplate output is what they can give you either on demand (for a peaker plant) or pretty much all the time (for a base load plant).

For renewables other than dam based hydro the nameplate output is what they produce under ideal conditions. Those ideal conditions probablly won't line up with peak demand.

Dam based hydro is an unusual case in that it can have very high peak power and deliver that peak power on demand but it's average power is limited by the water entering the top lake

Re:Already done?

[Bemopolis]

Theoretical maximum efficiency for any kind of solar plant (on the equator) is less than 200 Watts per square meter

BZZZT. The solar constant is 1360 W/m2 (minus atmospheric effects). With this, the efficiency is a reasonable 12%.

I suspect the number you have quoted there is the TMI of solar cells. This plant depends on thermal conversion, not liberating electrons across a silicon band-gap. I do respect your effort, and so will not request that you turn in your geek card.

Re:Already done?

[canajin56]

Excellent point. Except, your numbers are wrong. The peak insolation in Sicily is over 1 kW/M^2 at high noon on the equinox. So, that would mean they are horribly inefficient if 5 MW was their peak. At any rate, 250 Watts is the average for the entire world, for the entire year. Sicily isn't that far north...I believe its average insolation (again averaged over an entire year, not just during daylight) is around 180-220 Watts. (Italy is farther north than Florida, you're right, but latitude isn't everything. The average insolation in Florida is the same as the average insolation in the southern half of Oregon, maybe lower).

So, if they found a particularly sunny bit of Sicily, which I think is rarely cloudy as it is, an average insolation of 220 is probably believable. That puts it at 70% efficiency. That's kind of high, considering that they are doing solar energy to heat salt to heat water to turn steam turbine. But, it's not impossible. Plus, if their 5 megawatt figure is only the average when it's active, and it's inactive between midnight and dawn, that puts it more like 50% efficient, which is totally believable.

Re:Already done?

[Waffle Iron]

Unless, of course, you know, they're lying and it's like 5 megawatts peak capacity

Ok, we'll say that all power plants must be rated by their average annual power output. That means that if the utility installs a peaking unit run by a 5000hp diesel locomotive engine, but on average it runs only 1% of the time, then they will be required to always refer to it as a "30 kilowatt" facility (certainly not 3 megawatts!). Otherwise, they're lying.

Re:Already done?

[Anonymous Coward]

It uses a Sodium Nitrite/Nitrate mixture to absorb and store the sun's heat

This just another case of alternative energy projects taking food from the mouths of the world's starving masses. Don't they realize how many billions of servings of salami and hot dogs could be made from the preservatives locked up in just this one solar plant?

Re:Already done?

[spazdor]

As mentioned in TFS, salt's high capacity for heat makes its output/time curve significantly smoother.

Re:Already done?

[Tubal-Cain]

This one doesn't use salt, but we have had one very similar built here back in 2008. http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2010/07/areva-boosts-solar-supersteam-parameters-in-bakersfield

Huh. I don't live all that far from Bakersfield, and I've always wondered what that gangly thing was...

Re:Already done?

[Firethorn]

A 5MW windmill can be up and running for about 1.5M euros

Do you happen to have a source on that? I know that at the moment it's like $1.3 per , but last I heard wind turbines were running $2/watt and up.

So I might believe 5M, but not less than a third of that.

60M for 5MW is 12($15.60) per watt, which is kinda, sorta, acceptable for a test plant. But I'd say costs would have to come down nearly an order of magnitude for this to be truly economical.

I'd also want to know if that 30k m^2 can actually RUN that plant at 5MW all day and night, on average. What sort of capacity factor are we looking at?

Re:Already done?

[Beezlebub33]

No, that would be stupid. Under that logic (incoming car analogy!), my car goes 2 miles per hour (because it sits in my garage most of the time). But people don't talk like that. The car has a maximum speed (about 100), a maximum it usually goes (about 68), an average speed on my commute (probably 25 mph), and average speed (over its lifetime about 2 mph). Which 'speed' is my car?

A power plant has a 'rating' which is its max output. If you want the time average power output, you can get that, but its going to be either a prediction or historical. It's not a design parameter the same way that maximum is.

Re:Already done?

[canajin56]

1360 is in space, under constant light (which is why the microwave-beaming solar satellites are feasible at all). The atmosphere alone drops it to maybe 1100 or so (obviously less if its cloudy). But, that's still the number for high noon, not the overall figure. 250 is the actual global average. Higher near the equator, lower near the poles. Italy, like California, is about "average" in that sense. So, his number is a bit low because he assumed Sicily must get less sun than Florida (which is false), but 150 is much closer to the truth than 1360. If you want the plants average output, you should consider the average sunlight over 24 hours, not the peak.

Re:Already done?

[PrecambrianRabbit]

Good catch. In case anyone's curious, about 750 W/m^2 reach the Earth's surface on a clear day.

Re:Already done?

[annodomini]

Except if you follow the reference given in that link, you find that this was a test facility; the article may have meant that this is the first molten-salt solar plant used in production, not just for testing purposes.

Re:Already done?

[HereIAmJH]

The difference is for conventional power plants the nameplate output is what they can give you either on demand (for a peaker plant) or pretty much all the time (for a base load plant).

It's a discrepancy that we'll probably have to learn to live with since we are comparing different types of power generation. The purpose of base load plants is to always run at their most efficient output. Peaking is designed for rapid demand changes. And all the renewables are designed to exploit a natural resource they have little control over.

Since you can't determine what average or normal output would be until you install it at the site, how else should they rate them? Even site to site you will see dramatic changes, so me telling you that my 24 1.25MW farm averages xxMW wouldn't be relevant for your site.

Re:Already done?

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

That's great, really. But how much power is the "smoothed" output ?

I'm thinking 2 megawatts. 3 at best.

Re:Already done?

[TapeCutter]

Hmmm, can't find the source I skimmed yesterday, bit of googling for other sources seems to suggest the figure is closer to your $5M estimate, perhaps the source I used was counting some sort of subsidy, maybe I read it wrong, or maybe it was just bullshit, I'm not sure.

I think the reason they built the plant in TFA was to answer some of the other questions you're asking. ;)

Re:Already done?

[Firethorn]

Hmmm, can't find the source I skimmed yesterday, bit of googling for other sources seems to suggest the figure is closer to your $5M estimate, perhaps the source I used was counting some sort of subsidy, maybe I read it wrong, or maybe it was just bullshit, I'm not sure.

It's possible; many renewable projects like to hide just how much they cost. I still remember where a guy got 50% of his solar install paid for, PLUS an annual payoff of about what his electric bill USED to be and it was still going to take a decade to pay off the loan paying his average electric bill towards the loan.

I think the reason they built the plant in TFA was to answer some of the other questions you're asking. ;)

Thing is, I think that a few sensors, taking up no more than a dozen square meters, should be able to answer the power question - even then, regional power figures are known. Of which most I've heard says that it's not enough to provide 5MW 24/7 even in the summertime at that location. Actual efficiency numbers are unknown, but should be known to within a few percent by the engineers.

There's a lot of other questions/engineering tricks to work out, which is why I accept it as a test plant even at that expense. It's just that I generally find that, outside of computing, orders of magnitude drops in expense is rare.

Take electric cars - My general view is that there's nothing wrong with them that a battery that holds twice as many kwh at half the expense can't solve. All the parts in an EV can be broken down into individual components that are already common. Most of it's just a car. The electric motor, the battery, inverters, all already in existence. The controller is the unique part, but even that's mostly just components and programming to tie the parts together. The components aren't that expensive in bulk, and the programming costs aren't that different than keeping up on ECU programming for gasoline and diesel engines.

For these solar plants, it's not like they're going to come up with mirrors, motor systems, salts, pipes, turbines, etc... That are all an order of magnitude cheaper. Or, lacking von neumann machines, saving an order of magnitude in labor expenses.

Re:Already done?

[dave87656]

Same here. I saw a history channel show (iirc) in which they showed a very similar plant in the mid west someplace using salt as the concentrator.

Re:Already done?

[Grail]

5MW peak production capacity of the steam turbine, which is only limited by how fast the molten salt can turn water into steam.

So, pump heat into the salt all day while the Sun shines, extract 5MW at peak load when everyone gets home and turns their aircon, TV and kettle on.

Re:Already done?

[holmstar]

Your car tops out at 100? Must be rather boring to drive. 0-60 in what... 15 seconds?

Re:Already done?

[dwinks616]

Cars are for getting from point A to point B. Some people like to use them for excitement. Some people use them as penis-extensions.

Personally, I don't have a micro-penis to compensate for, nor do I need to needlessly further endanger the lives of everyone around me by driving too fast, accelerating too fast, taking turns too fast, etc etc.

I use my car to get groceries and go places I can't walk or bike to (reasonably). That's it. A faster 0-60 would only use more gas and pollute the Earth more. You might have a micro-penis or not give a shit about what the world's like when your kids have kids, but not all people are that stupid and ignorant.

Molten Salt.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's pretty bad ass.
Know what's awesome? There's more than enough energy for everyone, even after fossil fuels become prohibitively expensive.
Take that, nature! Lots more of us on the way!

Table manners

[Anonymous Coward]

Honey, could you please pass the molten salt?

Sounds cool, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, so it can produce after the sun has gone down, but wouldn't the inverse be true, too, i.e. it'll take longer for it to reach a heat at which it can start producing in the morning? Anyone who didn't fail physics want to help an ignorant AC out?

Re:Sounds cool, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds about right.

I would compare this to the temperature buffering effect of a lake, or the steadying effect of an engine's flywheel.

But if molten salt can hold more heat than some alternative, that alone is a good reason to use it.

Re:Sounds cool, but...

[Narcocide]

I would presume it works by making use of some amount of waste energy the solar panels themselves cannot fully absorb during the day.

Re:Sounds cool, but...

[jamesh]

I don't think you'd have to heat up all of your thermal mass to start producing energy. If you only need a certain fraction of the thermal mass to produce the amount of energy you need then the rest can be a 'battery' that you charge up during the day when there is extra solar radiation going into your system.

Re:Sounds cool, but...

[arivanov]

The network peak is in the first hours in the evening. Morning (while it warms up) is relatively low consumption. So if it can work through to what in the UK is referred to as the "Eastenders hour" it is well worth it. Pity they built it in Cicily though, I would really like to see those built in quantity in the Sahara. More sun, hotter sun and less cloud. The distance across the mediteranean is well within the limits of modern tech for a high voltage line on the sea bed. High voltage is also considerably safer compared to gas or oil in an earthquake zone (which is pretty much all of the Med).

Re:Sounds cool, but...

[T Murphy]

The Sahara may be a good place for mass production of solar power, but for a first-of-its-kind plant, keeping it close to home is a safer move (assuming the firsts involved don't put the neighbors at risk), in addition to needing to prove it is worth scaling up as opposed to other designs. This plant isn't wildly different, but given the cost of power plants and the demand for power, reliable and proven technology is a must before going beyond small-scale.

Re:Sounds cool, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

If they allow the salt to solidify, it would probably take la little longer to ramp up in the morning, but so long as they maintain a liquid state, it would work as well as any of the oils currently employed. Also, I believe one of the goals of this endeavour was to use a more benign material as the energy conduit. Additionally, salt has a greater capacity to absorb energy than the oils currently used, so I *think* that it has the ability to generate more gross energy over similar dimensions.

Re:Sounds cool, but...

[Deflatamouse!]

In other words, there's value in the ability to produce energy at a constant rate, rather than in bursts. Because when it's produced in bursts, you will have to find a way to store it, which means a loss in efficiency.

Re:Sounds cool, but...

[TapeCutter]

N. Africa seems to be high on the list of places where the EU want to go with solar.

Re:Sounds cool, but...

[Basje]

The location of the plant in Priolo Gargallo is not that far from the Sahara. It's actually a little more south than the northernmost part of the Sahara in Tunesia, which is roughly 250 miles west of the plant. The solar radiation will be roughly equivalent, no need for undersea cables. Most importantly Sicily is a (slightly) more stable region that does not rely on income from oil like many of the North Sahara states.

Re:Sounds cool, but...

[Joce640k]

Yep. The way I read this article is that the plant is designed to produce 5 megawatts, 24/7, in pretty much any weather. Peak output at noon on a sunny day will be much higher than that (I hope - 30 square km of mirrors is a lot of mirrors!)

Re:Sounds cool, but...

[Joce640k]

Ok, it's not 30 square km. I spotted it myself after I hit 'send'...

Re:Sounds cool, but...

[wisdom_brewing]

Square Root 30,000.

173.2m by 173.2m.

square 0.1732 km .

0.03 km - Doh!

Re:Sounds cool, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

There's not much advantage to producing at a constant rate, as compared to bursts. A nuclear plant typically produces constant power - but if you have no place to adjust production when consumption goes up or down it's still bad. Hydro power, on the other hand, is excellent at matching production at short notice - you can even use it to store energy from other sources by pumping water back up to the reservoir.

Re:Sounds cool, but...

[Glonoinha]

A square less than 200' on each side.
I can only imagine that this is something like the little array of mirrors inside a DLP television, except the mirrors are 1 square foot to 1 square meter each, they move following the sun to keep it focused on the boiler, and it covers half an acre of land. Nifty idea.

Re:Sounds cool, but...

[CarpetShark]

The Sahara may be a good place for mass production of solar power,

I think it would be better for harvesting solar power. Producing solar power in the Sahara could be little more destructive than hoped.

Re:Sounds cool, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry. It is coming. Apparently Morocco has signed contracts to supply the European Union with solar-thermal electricity. I believe Tunisia also.

http://www.greenprophet.com/2010/03/30/19189/morocco-9-billion-solar-energy/
http://www.greenchipstocks.com/articles/spain-morocco-solar-power-market/730
http://www.morocconewsline.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=427
http://www.renewablepowernews.com/archives/1024

Re:Sounds cool, but...

[russotto]

Most importantly Sicily is a (slightly) more stable region that does not rely on income from oil like many of the North Sahara states.

At least until the Mafia figures out a way to block out the sun.

Re:Sounds cool, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Most importantly Sicily is a (slightly) more stable region that does not rely on income from oil like many of the North Sahara states.

At least until the Mafia figures out a way to block out the sun.

No need, they'll just follow their standard operating procedures: "That's a nice field of mirrors you have there, be a shame if someone came an broke them all. For a price, we can make sure that doesn't happen..."

Re:Sounds cool, but...

[stubob]

Until the Earth decides that molten rock beats molten salt.

Re:Sounds cool, but...

[evilviper]

Not sure about the specifics of this plant, but molton salt is so hot that it can produce power for DAYS (after the sun explodes)... It does not have to restart from a stop in the morning. That's the whole idea behind the thing, you can use a turbine about half as large, as it will be running around the clock, rather than needing a 3X larger turbine in the middle of the day. The output will just be slightly lower in the morning, and slowly increase throughout the day.

Re:Sounds cool, but...

[evilviper]

I would really like to see those built in quantity in the Sahara

Yes, because it's a great idea to have all of our energy supplied by middle-east countries </sarcasm>

Re:Sounds cool, but...

[dwinks616]

Salt IS a rock.

What is the rating?

[Anonymous Coward]

I see articles and news sites reporting its rated capacity at 5 MW. Is that thermal or electric? Most power plants write 'MWe' or 'MWth' to avoid this type of confusion. If it is only 5 MW thermal, then they are being really shady about this.

Re:What is the rating?

[Anonymous Coward]

These numbers really don't add up. The article cites 2,100 tonnes of oil equivalent (which works out to about 3 MWth) and another cites 10 million kw-hrs of electricity per year (which works out to about 1.1 MWe). This would seem to imply the plant is about 3 MW thermal on average (and perhaps the extra 2 are only counted during the day). 30,000 square meters of reflectors perfectly aligned would generate about 30 MW thermal maximum at the best time of the year. Counting for night, seasons, etc., perhaps it could be diluted to 3 MWth.

Why are they citing all of the different numbers in CO2 equivalent, oil equivalent, and equivalent kw-hrs instead of actually saying what the actual electrical output is going to be on average?

Re:What is the rating?

[zippthorne]

Obviously, their audience is not engineers, but "feelies."

Re:What is the rating?

[CarpetShark]

If it is only 5 MW thermal, then they are being really shady about this.

So what do you propose? Opening the curtains?

Ooooooh.

[jtownatpunk.net]

I thought the headline said morton-salt.

Re:Ooooooh.

[Born2bwire]

When it rains, it p.... OH GOD! It's melting through my skin!!!!!

Re:Ooooooh.

[Anonymous Coward]

+1000

Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors

[RudyHartmann]

LFTR's will render these things irrelevant. http://energyfromthorium.com/lftradsrisks.html

Re:Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors

[Anonymous Coward]

A phrase one guy said back in the 50's, used often by anti-nuclear types, which needs to be retired.

Re:Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors

[Sabriel]

I wish it would hurry up and come true instead.

Re:Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors

[phantomfive]

Yeah, and fusion will one day render liquid fluoride thorium reactors irrelevant, but they've built something now, and it's environmentally friendly, and as long as the cost is reasonable, who cares? They still have something good now.

Re:Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors

[interkin3tic]

LFTR's will render these things irrelevant.

I try not to anticipate future technology that seems right around the corner, because otherwise I'll just get depressed thinking about where I am now: in an apartment, most appliances in which are not connected to the internet to manage themselves as I fly to Hawaii in my flying car, playing Duke Nukem Forever on my VR headset.

And no that wouldn't be unsafe because cars today are supposed to be driving themselves, I'm assuming that would work for flying cars too.

Anyway, if molten salt solar plats really do become obsolete because of whatever not-here-yet power source you're talking about, we'll have a good mass-popcorn maker.

Re:Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors

[dbIII]

Here we go again.
There is no "one true energy" because that is instead called putting all of your eggs in one basket. Anyone that tells you otherwise is either selling something or is gullible enough to have been conned by somebody that is. Thus even if there was an actual physical LFTR in existence it would not render all other forms of electricity production irrelevant.
Also we've got a hell of a long way to go before the practical details of working with molten radioactive materials are sorted out. I can't wait to see the "safe, clean" spin get put on liquid fluoride instead of treating it with the respect it deserves.

Re:Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors

[c6gunner]

Write your government rep, and tell them you want the nuclear regulations shitcanned. Oh, and educate the general public so that a repeal of at least two-thirds of those regulations isn't instant political-suicide for any politician who proposes it. Do that, and you might just get your wish.

Re:Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors

[AlecC]

Fusion power is thirty years away. Always has been, always will be.

Re:Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors

[argStyopa]

The problem is the cost.

Since nobody's farming lvl 60 areas, the price of thorium in the AH has skyrocketed.

Re:Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? "too cheap to meter" actually means "We can charge a small amount per unit, gradually increase it over time, and still make a fucking killing!"

Re:Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors

[goodmanj]

This plant has one key advantage over your pet "LFTR": it actually exists.

Actual power plants beat fictitious power plants any day of the week.

Re:Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors

[Aceticon]

I'm sure when fire was first invented somebody said that "man-made lightning will render these things irrelevant".

Re:Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors

[juasko]

The article says that it would be easily to restart... I wonder when that salt plug melts it wont be an easy restart of the plant. Need to get it up back from the cooling chamber and i guess they wont do that while it's molten.

Re:Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors

[WindBourne]

America R&D nearly all of the nuclear power plant types, and nearly all of the current AE being sought out. In fact, this molten salt approach was pushed by Boeing in the 90's, but W's admin shot it down. Check out my Journal. And yet, we said that Coal plants made all of them irrelevant.

The problem that America (and the west) has, is that far too many ppl wants us to depend on EXACTLY ONE THING. Well, that is the attitude that gets us in trouble. Instead, our leaders need to push a MATRIX of energy. If we have Fossil fuel accounting for about .33% of our energy today, then we would have little issue with killing it to clean up our air. BUT, when fossil fuel provides about 85-90% of your energy (in China, fossil fuel provides well over 95-99% of their energy), well, it is hard to walk away from it.

America needs to get rid of politicians that think like you. Instead, we need pols that put the needs of the nations ahead of their party, their religion, or their commercial buddies.

Re:Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors

[fritsd]

Glow, baby, glow!

Re:Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors

[Anonymous Coward]

... as long as the cost is reasonable, who cares? .

At 10cents per KWHour, this plant doesn't even make 500$ an hour at full capacity, or 12,000$ a day, or 5,000,000 dollars a year. Payoff is 10 years if we're being optimistic. How does this contrast with mining bituminous coal? Probably not that badly if we consider the apples to oranges layout of capital vs. cost/ton of coal.

Honestly I'd rather invest in coal however, as this tech is risky and couldn't possibly pay me the big margins until it's already 10 years old. Compound interest would seem to surpass this scheme with only 2 or 3 percent until it operates at 100% capacity for 15-20 years. Coal pays maybe 15% margins per ton in the US, so wasting money on this would only be of value as PR or as a prototype for some bigger technological groundbreaking. Smells like public policy PR to me.

Re:Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors

[Orange Crush]

There's room for both. The real-world costs of LFTR's still remain to be seen. There's not going to be a one-shot magic bullet for our future energy needs (there isn't even one for our today-energy needs). It's going to be a mix of several different power sources.

Re:Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, and the end of the world will also render fusion irrelevant, but I don't see that happening any time soon.... but I guess you can never predict these things.... I am nevertheless strongly confident in large leaps in technology at short notice; as history has shown.

By the way, modern nuclear reactors do not "explode and kill us all"; no, no, they melt. And for an LFTR a "bejillion years" is overdoing it somewhat, to say the least. Some future reactor concepts even allow for recycling of nuclear waste. But I guess nobody likes to be confronted with the facts. Having said that, nobody likes a smartarse either.

Anyway, the sun is a fusion reactor without a vessel and they are harnessing it's power, here on earth, at a soon-to-be competative LCOE.

Re:Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors

[CyprusBlue113]

Which is why the externalities of pollution need to be accounted for via regulation

Re:Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors

[Anonymous Coward]

Even 20 years until the initial investment is paid off seems reasonable enough to me from an economic standpoint. You say you'd rather invest in coal, but how long does it take for a coal plant + mining operation to pay back its startup costs and start earning a profit? Is it really that much less than this solar plant?

Should improve efficency!

[Antony T Curtis]

This is big news!

The larger the temperature difference, the more efficiently we can turn the heat into electricity. Superheated steam is just too difficult to manage over distances so this would make a great first step of collecting the solar energy and transporting it to a single location to make superheated steam.

The best part is that NaCl is non-toxic and doesn't need to be kept under pressure. If you have a natural gas Bunsen burner and good test tubes handy, it is just about possible to melt salt and prove to yourself how stable it is. Just be careful about spilling it because it is hot enough to get things like wood and paper to auto-ignite on contact. The hottest temperature you can expect to achieve with natural gas is around 700 degrees Celsius, if I remember correctly.

(as a side note, this is why low pressure nuclear power plants have such poor efficiency - because the water is only at 100 degrees Celsius after being heated by the nuclear fuel).

Re:Should improve efficency!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think nuclear power plant operators know something you don't.

Re:Should improve efficency!

[Joce640k]

30 square kilometers of land for 5 megawatts output? To me that doesn't seem very viable...there's single wind turbines with more output than that.

Re:Should improve efficency!

[Anonymous Coward]

"NaCl is non-toxic"

Dreck! Ingest 10 mg of NaCl and see how you feel.

Re:Should improve efficency!

[Anonymous Coward]

30000 sq. m = 0.03 sq. km

Re:Should improve efficency!

[Anonymous Coward]

(as a side note, this is why low pressure nuclear power plants have such poor efficiency - because the water is only at 100 degrees Celsius after being heated by the nuclear fuel).

You are wrong. A PWR's (and a BWR equivalently) operating temperature is based on the pressure rating of the secondary system (for saturation temperatures). 100 degrees Celsius would imply that the pressure rating of the secondary system was only atmospheric pressure. Most reactors have an operating temperature at about 300 degrees C. Note, that for Rankine cycles, the operating temperature can't go above 375 degrees C (the critical point of water). Nuclear reactors can also be coupled to non-Rankine cycles (such as the Brayton cycle), which will allow the operating temperature to be much higher (around 1000 degrees C).

Re:Should improve efficency!

[c0lo]

30 square kilometers of land for 5 megawatts output? To me that doesn't seem very viable...there's single wind turbines with more output than that.

30000 sqm does not make 30 sq km. Let's try some computations of achieved efficiency:

• Input - going maximal here. Solar energy flux - 1.44 kW/sqm (ignore absorption in atmosphere). Thus total input= 43.2 MW. Say it for 10 hours/day = 432 MWh
• output - 5 MW for 24 hours=120 MWh

Minimal modelled efficiency: 27%. - I'd say definitely a decent efficiency.

Can they improve? Keeping into account the last step of energy transformation (thermal->electric) operates between say 825 K (molten salt) and 400 K (water at 120 C - moving the turbines) and assuming a perfect Carnot cycle, the maximum efficiency achievable would be lower than 52%.

Re:Should improve efficency!

[Biogenesis]

With the numbers in the article I calculated 167W/m^2, or about 6% given the nominal 1000W/m^2 of incident solar radiation. I'm not sure if that's 24 hour output though, depending on how much night time output those numbers include the efficiency could be almost double. This is an overall system efficiency too, so I'm going to put this project into the "pretty reasonable" catagory. This form of low carbon electricity generation has the big advantage of producing much more consistant output, which is great for allowing controlled smoothing out of wind output.

Re:Should improve efficency!

[vivian]

You have done toe conversion wrong.

Its not 30 square Kilometers, it is a thousandth of that size - 30,000 Square meters.

30 Square Kilometers means 30 * 1000 * 1000 meters, or 30,000,000 Square meters - not 30 square kilometers.

 

Re:Should improve efficency!

[Anonymous Coward]

km^2 is (km)^2, not k(m^2)

Re:Should improve efficency!

[Joce640k]

Oh, duh! That's what I get for reading slashdot at 7am.

So we're talking a patch of ground, say, 300m by 100m. That's not so bad...

Re:Should improve efficency!

[Anonymous Coward]

(as a side note, this is why low pressure nuclear power plants have such poor efficiency - because the water is only at 100 degrees Celsius after being heated by the nuclear fuel).

Someone else already mentioned this, but here's some more information.

The dual unit nuclear power plant (both are Pressurized Water Reactors) I'm at is currently running as follows in the primary system:
Unit 1 - 577.9F (303.3C) / 2236.2 PSIG
Unit 2 - 573.4F (300.8C) / 2233.0 PSIG

Temperatures stated are average of the primary coolant entering and leaving the reactor vessel. The temperatures at the center lines of the fuel are closer to 1700F (926.7C)

Boiling Water Reactors are typically around 545F (285C) and 1000 PSIG. The only types of commercial nuclear power plants in the US are PWRs and BWRs. I don't know what "low pressure nuclear power plants" you might be referring to.

-Posting anonymously as I have moderated in this thread.

Re:Should improve efficency!

[QuantumPion]

(as a side note, this is why low pressure nuclear power plants have such poor efficiency - because the water is only at 100 degrees Celsius after being heated by the nuclear fuel).

The reason why nuclear power plants are not as efficient as coal or combined cycle plants is because as part of their design, they can not create super-heated steam, which limits the efficiency of the turbine. The steam created by the reactor or steam generators is typically at saturation temperature at 1000 PSI (~540 degrees F)

Re:Should improve efficency!

[Anonymous Coward]

You have done toe conversion wrong.

No, silly. It's five in one foot.

Re:Should improve efficency!

[PybusJ]

Er, I ingested more than 400mg of NaCl on my lunch today.

True, my government's recommendation is to ingest less that 6000mg per day, but it's manufacturers of processed food not renewable energy who threaten that.

Not that these heat storage systems use Sodium Chloride, I think they actually use Nitrates (i.e. fertilizer).

Re:Should improve efficency!

[DrVxD]

I think they actually use Nitrates (i.e. fertilizer)

So what you're saying is, they're full of shit?

Other reasons to use salt i.s.o. oil

[dr.Flake]

Wasn't another good reason to use salt, that molten salt has excellent thermal conduction properties??

As, you barely have to pump it around, for the heat to reach the reservoir.

Re:Other reasons to use salt i.s.o. oil

[iRommel]

Oh so much fail with the conversions. 30,000 m^2 = 30,000 / 1,000^2 km^2 = 0.03 km^2

Re:Other reasons to use salt i.s.o. oil

[Rogue974]

A reason not to use salt is what happens to it when it solidifies. We use reactors at the place I work that have liquid salt beds for heat exchange. They work great as long as we keep them hot and uniform temperature. If you get cold spots or if the overall temperature drops, the salt solidifies and you end up with a rock of salt in the reactor. To restart from the vessel cooling off takes days. With the salt so hot, if our heat source goes away, the salt cools fast so for a short upset (some as little as 15 minutes) can result in a 3 day outage. So salt has some great properties for heat exchange, but has some fun problems. I am sure they will have thought of this and have designed that with this in mind though.

Re:Other reasons to use salt i.s.o. oil

[JamesP]

I guess you could have (redundant) electric heaters for that

Or change the salt mixture, maybe something that goes "sludge" instead of becoming solid

Now the question is ...

[formfeed]

... is this plant kosher?

Re:Now the question is ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Rather ... they traded fat for hypertension?

Re:Now the question is ...

[MichaelSmith]

Israel will have their own kosher molten salt power plants. Tourists will charge their video cameras before they travel.

Re:Now the question is ...

[Anonymous Coward]

... is this plant kosher?

A more relevant question is, "is this plant halal"? If not, Osama Bin Laden will crash jets into the plant before you can say Jeeeeehaaaaad!

"Salt" != "NaCl"

[billstewart]

The article isn't specific about *what* salts they're using, but says "molten salts solidify at around 425 degrees F" - NaCl's melting point is about 800 C.
One of the articles they reference refers to another project that uses a mixture of sodium and potassium nitrates.

Re:"Salt" != "NaCl"

[c0lo]

The article isn't specific about *what* salts they're using,

This one does: the same as Solar One/Two - a mix of sodium/potassium nitrate.

Re:"Salt" != "NaCl"

[marcosdumay]

Well, you really don't want to run molten NaCl (or any other Cl, I of F salt) inside metal pipes. They can't be using carbonates, since you can't heat them that much. Sulfates are also too agresive, so they probably are using nitrates (altough I'd put a just a bit of a weak hidroxide in the mix).

Errr Barstow had a molten salt plant in the 90s

[not5150]

The article is incorrect... Barstow had a molten salt plant in 1995 I believe. Excerpt from the Wiki - "1995 Solar One was converted into Solar Two, by adding a second ring of 108 larger 95 m (1,000 ft) heliostats around the existing Solar One, totaling 1926 heliostats with a total area of 82,750 m (891,000 ft). This gave Solar Two the ability to produce 10 megawatts. Solar Two used molten salt, a combination of 60% sodium nitrate and 40% potassium nitrate," - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Solar_Project

Re:Errr Barstow had a molten salt plant in the 90s

[Anonymous Coward]

Errrrr....

France had one of these, inaugurated in 1983, called "Thémis".
http://www.outilssolaires.com/pv/prin-centraleB.htm
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrale_solaire_Th%C3%A9mis
(danger! websites in French).

It used a circuit of molten salt, just like the OP's "world's first molten-salt solar plant"

Both this and the Barstow plant were subsequently adapted for gamma-ray astronomy (on which I work, and spent much time there).

The plant was experimental, and I believe only produced a surplus of energy on one day! It was set up ostensibly on a green agenda, but may have been done mainly to research molten salt for the Superphenix nuclear reactor (now shut down).

Re:Errr Barstow had a molten salt plant in the 90s

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably the article should be modified to 'first commercial molten salt solar plant'
Barstow was like an experimental project.

Re:Errr Barstow had a molten salt plant in the 90s

[irid77]

Yes, but Solar 2 used molten salt as an overnight storage medium only. This plant uses it as the energy collection medium, and is the first to do that.

Re:Errr Barstow had a molten salt plant in the 90s

[PybusJ]

Both the French and Californian plants were solar tower type where the mirrors all concentrate the sun on to one point (from where heat energy can be extracted with molten salt).

The article is about a parabolic trough system where rows of mirrors with parabolic X-section concentrate the sun onto a pipe running along the focus point. This is easier to construct and scale than the towers you point to and is already deployed more widely. Previous trough systems have heated oil in the pipes then transferred the heat to salts for storage (then again to water to run a turbine).

The advance here is to avoid this oil to salt transfer, while the slashdot headline is inaccurate (shock horror), this something new and a genuine step forward.

Re:Conversions...

[Anonymous Coward]

30,000 square meters = 0.03 square kilometers

Desalinization?

[atomicstrawberry]

Could this technology be combined with desalinization, i.e. take salt water, pull the salt out to produce potable water, and use the salt to improve the plant's efficiency? Desalinization is a very energy-intensive process but I wonder if a lot of that could be offset using solar and redirecting the waste salt into the energy plant that powers the process in the first place.

Re:Desalinization?

[TooMuchToDo]

Yes. You could use any waste heat after the generation process to convert salt water to steam, extract the salt and sell it, and condense the steam back to water and have fresh water. Using the salt from the process might be possible, but more importantly you're desalinating water using the sun instead of diesel generators or natural gas turbines.

Re:Desalinization?

[Anonymous Coward]

No. The molten salt is in a closed circuit. They don't consume it and they don't need more than the optimal amount which they already have.

Re:Desalinization?

[DerekLyons]

Could this technology be combined with desalinization, i.e. take salt water, pull the salt out to produce potable water, and use the salt to improve the plant's efficiency?

No, once the plant is charged with working fluid, you don't need to add any more.

Re:Desalinization?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can use cheaper solar than this. Desalination works really well with low grade heat sources. See "flash evaporation desalination".

Re:Desalinization?

[Krahar]

I think the GPs point was that the salt you'd get this way would already be hot so you wouldn't have to heat it as much.

Re:Desalinization?

[LurkerXXX]

The salt used in the system is not NaCl. So, No.

Re:Desalinization?

[irid77]

Also, seawater is mostly NaCl, but this salt is NaNO3 mixed with KNO3. NaCl has a higher melting point and would solidify and gum up the works.

Re:Desalinization?

[Anonymous Coward]

The "waste salt" is not very hot in relative terms, since the entire point of a molten salt system is that it can get to temps of 1000 F (let's say 900 F above ambient) versus water that only gets to about 100 F above ambient before boiling off. And a desalinization plant only needs to boil water off and distill it, constantly feeding in more sea water so the salt concentrations do not go too high (and further raise the boiling point). It's not a salt farm that needs to work down to a dry pan of salt, and if it were, you would simply let solar-driven evaporation work slowly on a large salt flat, not try to superheat the pond.

Re:Desalinization?

[DerekLyons]

If the plant is already operating, then it's working fluid (salt) is already hot and wouldn't need to be heated as much either. In fact, of the two, the working fluid is likely to be slightly hotter.

Re:Desalinization?

[marcosdumay]

Not to say that hot NaCl would also corrode all your equipment in a brink.

Molten salt is not new...

[Anonymous Coward]

Themis is even a pretty old story... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Themis_%28solar_power_plant%29

A big problem was to keep the molten salt to temperature especially at night, making the system consuming energy at the end of the day.

You're forgetting something

[LordLucless]

Ahhh! Nuclear! Ahhh! It'll explode and kill us all and poison the planet for a bejillion years!

Re:You're forgetting something

[PseudonymousBraveguy]

That's not funny, that's insightful. Because you would have to fight exactly that attitude when trying to build a new nuclear reactor of any kind. And I can't see a lot of countries in europe where you could possibly win that fight (and I don't know enough about the popular opinion about nuclear energy in the US, but I'd guess it would be at least a pretty tough fight).

Re:You're forgetting something

[GigaplexNZ]

And just forget about trying it in New Zealand. The US aren't even allowed to bring nuclear powered vessels into NZ waters.

Re:You're forgetting something

[PiSkyHi]

Yes, you use Kevlar, I'll use a radiation suit.

Re:You're forgetting something

[barzok]

kill us all and poison the planet for a bejillion years!

If we're all dead, what do we care if the planet is poisoned for a bejillion years?

All this "save the planet" stuff is really "keep the planet habitable for humans." No humans, no worries.

Re:You're forgetting something

[sjames]

But you'll have stronger AND brighter teeth!

Re:You're forgetting something

[Sardaukar86]

And just forget about trying it in New Zealand. The US aren't even allowed to bring nuclear powered vessels into NZ waters.

Good point. Talk about missed opportunities though! We're collectively guarding our image very jealously, but I wonder how clean, green and proactive would we look on the world stage if we helped pioneer efforts into fast-breeder research?

Remember the ad: "..you said 'No,' to nuclear power.. even though you invented it.."

Back of the envelope power cost calculation

[billstewart]

Most articles talking about power generation are talking about electrical power, so I'd guess that.

Is this thing really cost-effective? If it's mostly a proof of concept it doesn't have to be, of course. I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation:

• 5MW * 10 Hours/day = 50 MWH/day = 50000 kWH/day (assumes you don't get peak power all day.)
• 50,000 kWH/day @ 10c/kwh = $5000/day (US power prices seem to start around 10 cents per kWH, though they're higher at prime times.)
• $5000/day * 300 days/year = $1.5M/year
• Euro 60M is about 50 years payback at that rate. Or 25 years if it's 20c/kWH.

So it's shiny and renewable (assuming the plant lasts a long time and doesn't break down into rusty mirrors encrusted with stray salt leaks in a year or two), and not *way* out of line compared to other power sources like coal plants, but it's not aggressively cheap either.

Re:Back of the envelope power cost calculation

[c0lo]

Euro 60M is about 50 years payback at that rate. Or 25 years if it's 20c/kWH.

As the plant buffers the energy to use it at night, I'd be inclined to use a 24 hours/day * 5 MW.
Assuming that all the other calculations are correct, this would mean approx 21 years for the payback at 10c/kWh, or 10.5 years at 20c/kWh.

Re:Back of the envelope power cost calculation

[Anonymous Coward]

Interest at 4%
2.4M a year
loss per year .9M

I wonder what it costs to operate ?

I would love to find out how much liability insurance is on molten salt.

Property tax might be cheap in Spain, or the tax bill on a couple hundred acres and a 60M plant would eat into that 5M subsidy they got.

Re:Back of the envelope power cost calculation

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the FIRST plant, what it cost is pretty meaningless. You need to ask what it would cost to deploy and run the next 1000 plants. Experience will accumulate, production will be scaled up and competition emerge.

Re:Back of the envelope power cost calculation

[Anonymous Coward]

It generates 5MW with full sun. It can then release this energy at a slower rate.

24h x 365days x 5MW = 43.8 million KWh.

Enel's web site says it will generate "around 10 million kilowatt-hour per year". Which means it is generating at 5MW for an average of 22% of the day.

So if anything, the parents estimates are wildly optimistic (You only have full strength sun for a small part of the day), and should be roughly doubled.

Re:Back of the envelope power cost calculation

[c0lo]

You're right. 10 mils kWh/year. Meaning 1 mil at EU 0.1/kWh. Minus operational costs, will take more than 60 years to pay back at the current level of prices.

Re:Back of the envelope power cost calculation

[Impeesa]

So if anything, the parents estimates are wildly optimistic

Yeah, you should definitely take those numbers with a grain of salt.

Re:Back of the envelope power cost calculation

[zippthorne]

Oh, that's too bad. When I did my back-of-envelope calculations I'd assumed they were using enough salt for a full-day buffer, and more importantly, that 5MW was the average.

At 5MW average, they'd be pulling about 50% efficiency. Certainly theoretically possible at 1000+ degrees on the hot side, but quite respectable enough, depending on what the costs to build the thing are.

But 22% of 50% is not impressive at all. Not unless land is freaky cheap.

Re:Back of the envelope power cost calculation

[zippthorne]

60 years is ok, so long as the EROI is good. Power stations aren't something you're just going to get sick of in 60 years and want to get rid of. Also, for a prototype plant, I'd expect there to be a lot of waste of both manpower and horsepower in building the thing that would get trimmed over time if it was at all profitable to do.

Re:Back of the envelope power cost calculation

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

and not *way* out of line compared to other power sources like coal plants, but it's not aggressively cheap either.

First the whole idea of melting salt and storing it is to provide a steady energy capacity. The 5MW is steady output 24/7. Not the 10 hours you assumed. The article does not say so explicitly. But the peak solar output is slightly over 1 kW/m^2. The peak production capacity would be 30 MW for an hour or so at around noon. Accounting for the angle of incidence, cloud cover, nights, storage losses etc averages the output to 5 MW steady. So the revenue is $12000 a day at 0.1 $/kWh. or 4.4 m$ a year. works out to 5% return on investment (at 1.3 euro/USD). Cost of maintenance, salaries etc would reduce the return to may be 3%.

On a coal plant the initial investments are lower and the return would be much higher. But it has a large running cost. Price of coal. Sunlight is free. Coal plant economics is, smaller initial investment, and a larger revolving credit to buy coal, make electricity, collect payments and pay off the coal company, rinse and repeat.

Anyway, it is incredible that this technology that is just born is already competitive with a technology that has been fine tuned and developed for nearly a century. Its costs can fall steeply in the coming years. Coal tech, is nearly as low cost as we can humanly get, and no further reduction is coming without compromising safety.

Re:Back of the envelope power cost calculation

[DrSkwid]

In the UK I pay the French :

First 900 kWhs per year 21.021 pence - $0.324
Rest 10.5525 pence per kWh - $0.1626

I use about 3300 kWhs per year so on avg I pay 13.4p or $0.20

So you're down to 25

with the 24/7 thing someone else mentioned that's 12.5 years payback - pretty good I'd say

Re:Back of the envelope power cost calculation

[DrSkwid]

Tax might be cheap in Spain, but Sicily is in Italy.

Re:Back of the envelope power cost calculation

[Yungoe]

You beat me to posting this calculation. However you are calculating revenue as the ROI and not profit. They still have to operate the plant and pay the distribution costs. This will lower their ROI significantly. If they are making a 10% profit, which I think may be high, then the profit at $.10 becomes 1 cent per KWH. If you wanted your money back in 20 years, you would have to make a profit of $.17 per KWH.

60Million/20 years = 3M per year
3M/365 Days = $8,220 Profit a day.
$8220/ capacity of 50,000 KWH per day = $.16

This means you have to charge more than twice the going rate for electricity. Eventually, as fossil fuels become more scarce, this will be a cheaper way to make power. I suppose that it is 60M well spent on R&D.

Re:Back of the envelope power cost calculation

[WindBourne]

Here in Colorado we pay .07/Kwh at its peak. At nightime, it is .03. The lowest state has something like .03/kw (or was it .027) daytime rate.

Re:Back of the envelope power cost calculation

[rjstanford]

Land is freaky cheap, compared to construction costs. However, you're comparing construction costs (without ongoing maintenance) to retail electricity pricing at residential levels. That could be more of an issue.

Re:Back of the envelope power cost calculation

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah and this is 0.03 sq km. i dont know if this scales linearly or not but lets remove about 50%. That would say you could get 33.3 5MW plants on a sq km. thats 166.5 MW lets say that expanding the solar plant costs about 50% of the initial cost ( its probably lower) 30M * 33.3 = 1 BN euro for 166 MWh.
im assuming 10c/KW prices = 100$/MW
for 10 hour days that would mean 1660 MWh/day @ 100$ 166 000$/day * 300 days/year 49 800 000$ /year. cost = 1.280.000.000 $, means 25 years to make profit
for 24 hour days that would mean 3984 MWh/day @ 100$ 398 400$/day * 300 days/year 119 520 000$/year cost = 1.280.000.000 $ means 10.7 years to make profit

and now we have large scale factories for building cheaper solar panels
and molten salt resistant pipes
and standardized maintenance procedures
and (probably) technological advancements
and that would mean the next 1 sq km could probably be built for 25-50% of the price of the first sq km and then we're talking profit in 5-10 years

well thought i wouldnt post this, it was basically just an exercise for my self =) These estimates are probably optimistic, im no economist nor engineer. But it seems like everything else, once mass produced, does become available for a fraction of the initial price.

Re:Back of the envelope power cost calculation

[lsmo]

What about the increase of the cost of power over time. Power will not always start at $00.10 a kwh. Humans in general don't conserve resources, we use as much as we have. Don't get me wrong there are a few of us out there that know how to conserve, but that is not the norm.

Re:Back of the envelope power cost calculation

[billstewart]

That 60 years isn't a physical lifetime, it's a payback period - so your ROI is really really low. (Ignoring inflation, changes in energy costs, etc., it's like 1.6%... not competitive at all.)

Re:Back of the envelope power cost calculation

[treeves]

or, you know , a droplet of molten salt.

Re:Back of the envelope power cost calculation

[holmstar]

Really? I mean, I'm an american, and I know we americans are known for our wastefulness and whatnot, but my 75 gallon saltwater reef aquarium uses about 4200 kWh per year on it's own. (most of that is for heat and lighting)

Re:Back of the envelope power cost calculation

[DrSkwid]

i only use it for my lights, fridge, shower & laptop

i use gas for cooking & heating

I truly hope you're right

[Scareduck]

Solar's energy density is terrible, it doesn't store readily, and doesn't work when the sun goes down. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what the molten salt is for, but tell me this: how long can you afford to be without actual sun (number of consecutive cloudy or mostly cloudy days) before this is neutered? Thorium fission is the most likely way out of the current energy conundrum. If its proponents aren't lying to us or themselves about its economic viability.

Re:I truly hope you're right

[Anonymous Coward]

Usually when there's no sun, there is either plenty of wind or plenty of rain, which replenishes hydroelectric plants' accumulations. Besides, often substantial part of the energy needs are due to climate conditions. For instance, solar power plants should compensate fairly well for ramped up power usage by HVACs during sunny summer days. Of course, it isn't reliable enough for continuous power requirements of industrial processes, but no solution fits all purposes equally well. Thorium fission is OK, but it doesn't mean solar should be rejected. The price of solar and other renewable energy plants' input is certainly right!

Re:I truly hope you're right

[DrSkwid]

Isn't the idea to spread dependence away from one source ?

Re:I truly hope you're right

[Anonymous Coward]

You forget one thing... you get better density closer to the sun. Beyond that, Thorium supplies are limited in quantity, so it is only a short term solution (however big an amount you think we have, it's going to be gobbled up as soon as an efficient way of using it is developped, we're almost out of Uranium already). Another important point to remember is that the energy crisis is upon us NOW. Already solar and wind lags behind significantly in terms of development and deployment. A thorium plant only exists on paper. As nice as things look on paper, there is a significant amount of R & D and deployment time before the first one gets online.

As an aside, we probably should learn to live within the energy density limits imposed by renewables. That is the best way of ensuring we are not overstressing the ecosystems. We have gotten into this habit of thinking of the ecosystems as a luxury, something that it's nice to take care of if we have the "extra money" to do so. The sad reality is that existing ecosystems are our main life support system. Because they have been online long before humans showed up, we have taken them for granted, but if one thing is clear from the fossil record is that they can very easily crash in a very dramatic manner. If we were in a moon colony, would we allow everybody to use all the energy they wanted? Probably not, because life support would have to take priority over other uses. Would we allow everybody to have all the kids they wanted whenever they wanted? Probably not, as the popluation growth would have to wait until the life support systems had been increased to support them. The earth's life support was just so big and reliable that we just took it for granted and got in the habit of abusing it without regard to the future. Yet we still depend on it for so many things, from food production, to filtration of water bodies, to CO2 scrubbing etc. etc. etc.

How much of it can we destroy before we actually sabotage our survival odds? The answer is: "we don't know". I would argue to tread carefullly and stress the system as little as possible, because as an endotermic relatively large animal with high energy needs (even greater energy needs if you want us to survive as a techological civilisation, not mere basic subsistance animals), the past extinction events indicate that we are among the most at risk of disappearing, leaving more room for only the smallest endoterms, a bit larger ectoterms, and comparatively very little affected arthropods (the Permian-Triassic event is the only known mass exctinction of insects). Remember folks, preserving ecological balance is foremost about the survival of our species. I have little fear for life itself (individual species is another thing altogether). Although Thorium is not a greenhouse gas source, and it presents less risks of radioactive accidents, if it were to provide us with a substantial amount of energy that allowed us to ignore energy limits for too much longer, it would only encourage us to put even more stress on our life support system. Living within the limits of renewables does not mean that we go back to the stone age, by any means. Mostly we have to live more efficiently. Urban sprawl, suburbs and globalization have to disappear as concepts. More local production (and jobs, hey, isn't that a good thing?). It means losing the inneficiencies of the modern ages, but alos the innefficiencies of the olden days (they didn't use a fraction of the potential energy from renewables back then: a lot of it went to waste even then). I'm thinking, less hectic lifestyles. Probably more pleasant all around. More home gardens (for food, more than flowers). It doesn't have to be all that bad. Unless spending hours in the traffic jams, or freezing your ass off in the middle of summer (because the lobotomized apes who run the school's AC don't know that you don't need to keep the temperature at 18C to keep it bearable) then it won't be that bad.

It's really not competitive yet

[QuantumG]

5MW for $60M (euro).. really?

At 10c/kWh it can earn $500/hr. So it'll only take ~13.7 years to pay it off.. oh it's solar, right, well, with the seasons and everything I guess it's more like double that. Let's say ~27 years. How much is maintenance? Oh yeah, and the time value of money.

Another way of looking at it: it's $12B/GW + operations. Nuclear power plants take 5-10 years and cost $4-10 billion to build, and $4-6 billion for fuel and operation over their lifetime, so $8B/GW to $16B/GW. So the cheapest nuclear reactor beats this by at least 35% and the most expensive nuclear reactor probably beats it also.

But that fact that they've even made it into the right ballpark is impressive and perhaps once they scale it up to somewhere that is actually useful we'll have some idea how competitive it can be.

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[Jheralack]

You are ignoring the cost to store the nuclear waste, which every nuclear advocate seems to ignore. I'm not interested in kicking the can down to the next generation (or 10!).

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[Rakshasa Taisab]

Can you spell the words; Prototype, Low-Maintances and Zero Emissions?

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[BitZtream]

Yep, gotta start somewhere, it'll grow I'm sure as it already has. The key is that it (well, all combined renewable energy sources) needs to grow faster than our consumption does.

I'm sure eventually that will happen as we'll run out of non-renewable fuels at which point our consumption and renewable fuel supplies will match perfectly!

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[TheEyes]

What they really need to do is put it in a place like the Sahara, or Death Valley, where you're assured of bright sunshine practically year round. Who in the world decided an island was the best place to put a solar plant?

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[thegarbz]

It's far worse than you think. 30,000 sq m of mirrors? 3 miles of pipe? Cost aside for 5MW that is an insane amount of real estate for such little area. Our 10MW natural gas turbine at work is about 4m wide, 8m long and 7m high. Add a Heat Recovery Steam Generator to the other side of it and for a little more space you get another 7MW, and all of that still fits into a typical restaurant car park. So if you had huge amounts of disposable cash this plant would still be useless anywhere near a city, or a town, or an industry. That is a crying shame too since 5MW is so small it is basically only practical for industrial or commercial co-generation.

This seems to smell of "just because you can, doesn't mean you should"

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[QuantumG]

The $4-6 includes waste disposal. Actually what I'm ignoring is the cost of decommissioning the plant and that's because I have no way of estimating how much this mirror farm will cost to decommission.

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[Anonymous Coward]

5MW for $60M (euro).. really?

That's normal. First, it's a prototype. Second, it's Italy. Third, it's Sicily.

The project started something like 20 years ago by the Nobel Prize laureate (physics) Carlo Rubbia. Seven different governments (both right-wing and center-left-wing) made every effort to cripple the project with bad management and bureaucratic issues. At the same time they poured heaps of money to dubious Sicilian consulting organisations. After a while (actually, after being dismissed from the environmental cabinet) Carlo Rubbia got tired of all these problems and flew to Spain where he built in 3 years six or seven similar plants for a tenth of their Italian price.

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[ducomputergeek]

If you reprocess the nuclear fuel and use breeder reactors you can power fission reactors for a few hundred years. At the end of it you end up with small amounts of hot material that remains dangerous for a couple hundred years. Not the couple eons of the current system of fueling reactors. And we're talking about hundreds of GW's of power for a couple hundred years with not a lot of waste.

We know what the costs are and as it stands, nuclear is really best form of energy for base load generation we have and we know it works.

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[QuantumG]

Most American nuclear engineers have a low opinion of nuclear because of the once-through policy. Everyone else in the world uses their nuclear material up a lot more and store just the waste, the US stores perfectly good fuel because it might be a "strategic asset" one day. As such, nuclear in the US is legally required to be inefficient by the highest law in the land. Which is amazing, when you consider how much it still kicks butt.

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[Anonymous Coward]

But this power plant leaves your children a world where they can live without growing gills.

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[Darkman, Walkin Dude]

Our 10MW natural gas turbine at work is about 4m wide, 8m long and 7m high.

If your natural gas turbine doesn't generate the natural gas, you aren't giving the full story here though. You also need hundreds of miles of carefully sealed pipelines and/or freight infrastructure, you also need the refining and mining infrastructure, and you need to factor in the cost for exploration and developing the mine in the first place, with all the dead ends that implies. Natural gas might be cheap but its often subsidised at source, but hey so what you say, I don't pay it. If you live in Europe and the Russians want to extract a trade agreement or something from you, the cost of that natural gas might suddenly start to fluctuate wildly however.

And thats the full story.

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[barv]

I can buy a 5KVA petrol Genny for about $450. So for $450,000 + fuel I could make 5MW. A course, bigger gennys would be cheaper, and more fuel efficient.

Lets face it, the future is direct conversion and efficient mass energy storage systems. Everything else is wanking.

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[DryGrian]

Can you spell the words; Prototype, Low-Maintances and Zero Emissions?

Well, I can, but...

Sorry, couldn't resist.

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[QuantumG]

Yep, and to make mirrors you need........

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[Anonymous Coward]

But how much would 30000 sqm cost in Sahara? In the deserts of Nevada? Just because you're using the power in Vegas doesn't mean you have to put the plant there, does it?

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[Darkman, Walkin Dude]

To keep them operational? Nothing at all. I guess sunlight if you wanted to be pedantic.

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[Anonymous Coward]

And thats the full story.

No. Once you run out of gas, you have to wait for large expensive forests to grow up and be buried at great depth. With a turn-around time of millions of years, the ROI is awful. Alternatively, you can produce biofuel more quickly, but people will want the area for food-production, and you're competing for the fuel with jet aircraft which can really not run on electricity. At that point, you will probably give up and send money out of the country to purchase a proven solar energy plant from a European company. And THAT'S the full story...

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[0100010001010011]

What waste? If there is something coming out of the plant that is radioactive, then it's not waste and can be refined and used as fuel.

Ideally you'd have uranium coming in and lead going out. But stupid laws prevent that stateside.

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[Laser Dan]

Yep, and to make mirrors you need........

... manufacturing facilites only during the construction.
After that, you're done.

With gas pipelines you need the pipelines to stay there, without holes, and with someone pumping gas in the other end.

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[Rogerborg]

Your figures are ludicrously off.

It's not 60M Euros for 5MW. It's 60M Euros plus the cost of the 5MW of coal, gas, oil or nuclear capacity that you'll need on cloudy days.

If we're going to beat up on solar, let's do it properly.

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[dbIII]

Nuclear power plants take 5-10 years

Name the full scale plant that was built so quickly in recent years.

and cost $4-10 billion to build

Once again - name the plant.
You've been misled by salesfolk that spin the nuclear debate off into never-never land with rubbery figures sprinkled with utter bullshit and shaped into what focus groups think would be about right for a price.
If you are going to put numbers up on such a debate that is full of outright lies on both sides you are going to have to tie it to reality somewhere or you will only be preaching to the converted.

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[meringuoid]

dubious Sicilian consulting organisations

Is that the current name for them? I suppose it was only a matter of time before they moved into the consultancy racket...

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[delt0r]

The idea of using salt is so that you can store the heat for cloudy days. Also you have clearly not spent any time in Sicily. I don't think they even have a word for cloud ;) really.

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[delt0r]

To be sure, nuclear needs a better waste plan. However there are many methods that could potentially deal with it. We just don't at this stage since no one wants a new reactor built anywhere...

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[c6gunner]

Yes, but which nuclear reactor type are you talking about? Most don't qualify as "prototype" any more. Thorium-fueled?

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude
10,800 sq m is the area of a football (soccer) field.(Well the high end of the limit of a official field) 120m x 90m = 10,800m^2 so its only 3 soccer fields worth of mirrors

You could fit one above the parking lot of a mall, if so inclined.

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[CubicleView]

I estimate that it would cost something in the the region of sweet fannyy f**k all to decommission this plant.

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[AlecC]

Its decommissioning costs will be negligible compared to nuclear, because you can go straight out with curring tools and throw the metal into a scrap mill. I would have thought, at a rough guess, that the scrap metal value would pay for cutting down and carting away the structures, leaving you only the site remediation to do - a well understood problem. Depending, of course, on scrap prices. Whereas nuclear reactors have to be dismantles by radiation tolerant remote handlers in such a way that no dust leaks out, sorted int different levels of radiation, sealed up appropriately to remain secure for thousands of years, and transferred securely to disposal sites.

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[Anonymous Coward]

Or 0.13 Mall Of Americas @230,000m^2 of retail space,

Or 3.22 Yankee Stadiums (East 161st Street & River Avenue Bronx, New York 404945N 735535W) not counting the backstop or center field @ 9,312 m^2

Or 2.57 Wrigley Fields (Home of Elwood Blues 1060 West Addison Street Chicago, Illinois 60613 415654N 873920W) @ 11,642m^2

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[thegarbz]

Yeah half true. Though you can't count the cost of developing the mine since the mine will likely have a larger output and will as such cover itself. No one is crazy enough to mine natural gas, just so they can run a turbine to power the mine :)

Though you have raised one very critical point. This technology like every is dependant on the situation. The full story is I live in Australia. Natrual gas and Syngas are our two biggest booming industries, and there are existing natural gas pipelines all over the place. With that infrastructure in place you'd be mad not to use it despite an over abundance of sunlight we have. As the example I used earlier, the sum total of the additional infrastructure that was built was two 200m pipelines down the road and three valves connecting to the main town gas supply.

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[drinkypoo]

And thats the full story.

Almost! You forgot the environmental impact of burning the natural gas! Solar plants don't produce CO2 in operation. (The most efficient ones indeed produce Oxygen... h0h0h0)

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah! Let's never EVER invest in research along other lines, because they will never work!

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[Rogerborg]

Here's the thing, cupcake. On the freak occasion when you get two cloudy days, if you haven't paid for that 5MW of reliable generation, then the lights really do go out. And then come the zombies.

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[TheCarp]

Just a bit of a nit pick, you also need a portion of that capacity available to produce parts for maintenance. Though, I think we can safely assume, for mirrors, that this will continue to exist regardless of these mirror farms. Which is why its just a nit pick.

-Steve

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[fritsd]

Solar plants don't produce CO2 in operation.

To be honest though, that can be seen as an *advantage* of the natural gas plant in some circumstances, e.g. when it is burning bio-gas made from cowshit: it enters the atmosphere either as CO2 or CH4, and CH4 is a much more potent greenhouse gas.
See for example projects in Europe in the field of biogas and combined heat & power.

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I'm not great at math but:

Nuclear power plant by your calculation costs ~12 Billion
Lets say (just for fun) that its not a huge plant, so it generates 500MW

So basically the nuclear plant is generating 100 times more electricity than the solar plant. So simple math here, instead of $500/hr it earns: $500/hr x 100= $50,000/hr.

Ok, so how long till that pays off: $12billion/($50,000/hr) = 240,000 hrs= 10,000 days=27.4 years !!!!

So this modest nuclear power plant pays off in EXACTLY the same time that you calculated for the solar plant.

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[PybusJ]

But now it's only a freak occasion you're worried about, you could do what is _already_ done to deal with exceptional problems in power generation and give larger industrial customers a discount for the possibility that they'd have to lose a day or two's operation when that happens. This turns out to be cheaper than keeping unnecessary generation capacity on standby.

By adjusting these discounts you can create a significant elasticity in the demand. If, in the future, we move some proportion of travel to use rechargeable electric vehicles, then there will also be a degree of flexibility in the rate these need recharging which can also be exploited by adjusting price.

No need for the lights to go off and leave you in the dark with your fear of zombies. Put your imagination to better use.

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[delt0r]

And then come the zombies.

I have slave ninjas.

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[MrKaos]

Ideally you'd have uranium coming in and lead going out. But stupid laws prevent that stateside.

No. Material Sciences prevent that. It is not possible yet to build a breeder reactor that has a similar lifespan to the fuel that is being used. Even if it was constructing such a reactor project would radically change society. Politically, the proper design process would go beyond the shallow terms of office occupied by elected officials and commercially the contracts to finance these power generation projects revolve around a 40-50 year term and would require a new legal construct to fund it. Besides, you don't want a breeder reactor you want a Burner reactor that consumes transuranics (like pu-239) into fissile ash if you are to solve the high level waste problems. It's the fissile ash that has a shorter (around 600 year) half lives that dictates the required reactor lifespan. With current stockpiles of transuranics there is about 5000 operating years of fuel for such a project. So lets be clear about this;

Any potential Reactor design would have to have a minimum 600 year lifespan to be a viable operation. Why, you ask?

1. Because the energy to build, decommission and fuel a reactor exceeds the expected energy output of the reactor over it's life if it's any shorter. I know this is contrary to many peoples beliefs but the reason is because the amount of energy extracted from the ore is a very small fraction of the energy available from the ore with current reactor technology.

2. It would have to be housed in the belly of a geologically stable solid granite mountain, like Cheyenne_Mountain as you would need to process, use and store the fuel on site and be safe from attack. When it's not possible to use the reactor anymore it would be sealed in the mountain for it to all cool thus avoiding the energetic costs of dismantling the reactor.

3. It will need a massive infrastructure project to support it to transport an estimated 70,000 tons of pu-239 from around the country (the US in this case) to the facility which itself is estimated as a 30 year project.

In the meantime you are going to need well developed wind, solar, wave and geothermal power projects to support such a long term project. Don't get me wrong, I think it could be possible, in fact I think it needs to be done as it's irresponsible of our generation to hand future generations a radioactive externality to handle the way our generation has been handed a carbon externality to handle. Anyone thinking one electrical power generation method (like nuclear) is going to solve our problems is deluding themselves and if you don't have the balls to advocate for a properly designed Nuclear facility and infrastructure the you should STFU about Nuclear power because it is not responsible nuclear advocacy.

To re-iterate, whilst necessary, a properly designed Nuclear Infrastructure is a 50-100 year project to implement and will *require* the support of wind, solar, wave and geothermal reserves. Flamebait? You may think so, but this is the reality we have to face if we want to overcome the mess of the last 50 years of Nuclear Industry. In the meantime developments such as this molten salt solar plant is exactly what we need.

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[drinkypoo]

To be honest though, that can be seen as an *advantage* of the natural gas plant in some circumstances, e.g. when it is burning bio-gas made from cowshit: it enters the atmosphere either as CO2 or CH4, and CH4 is a much more potent greenhouse gas.

I would support legislation requiring the capture of methane from all animal crap when it would otherwise simply be kept in a holding pond.

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[demigod]

Oops. You forgot to include the cost of dealing with the spent fuel.

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[wkcole]

The $4-6 includes waste disposal.

False.

I can say that with certainty because there is no functioning permanent waste disposal system for fission plants anywhere in the world. There are plans, fantasies, hand-waving, and excuses, but nothing that actually demonstrates anyone's hypotheses about long-term costs. As recently as 2008, the lobbyists for enhancing fission subsidization in the US were still basing their "cost accounting" on antique and dishonest budgeting for Yucca Mountain that has not been updated because no one sane actually believes that Yucca Mountain will ever go live.

This is not an argument against fission specifically. Externalized and socialized costs are a problem for essentially all forms of power generation, as is delusional forecasting. What does it cost to produce fission fuel when the average cost of oil production is $50/bbl? I don't know, but I'm pretty sure that it won't be what anyone promoting fission today cites. Any energy generation system that depends on an ongoing input of a fuel that requires energy to extract, prep, and ship has similar uncertainties because the world is migrating to increasingly expensive methods for extracting fossil fuels. Until we actually have other sources providing the bulk of energy inputs for mining, processing, and transporting Uranium, Thorium, Lithium, or Heavy Water, the cost of an energy economy migrating towards nuclear technologies and batteries is going to be heavily influenced by the costs of extracting oil from sand, shale, and below miles of water and the costs of mountaintop removal and hydraulic fracturing for coal and gas.

A feature of all forms power generation that exploit an existing natural energy transfer in place rather than using an extracted resource is that cost is heavily front-loaded and hence largely knowable before production starts. The only external economic changes that can harm the operating profitability of plants that exploit natural energy transfers are a significantly increased labor:energy price ratio (not likely) and hard dependence on maintenance materials that may become scarce and hence prohibitively expensive. A power plant whose only special material need is a large quantity of mixed alkali nitrates/nitrites is pretty safe on the materials cost side.

Actually what I'm ignoring is the cost of decommissioning the plant and that's because I have no way of estimating how much this mirror farm will cost to decommission.

No one has budgeted for the decommission costs of Hoover Dam either...

Nuclear fission and coal plants have significant decommission costs because they tend to toxify their sites. Those need to be planned for because they are virtually assured by their narrow operating margins to reach a point where they need to be decommissioned before their planners are beyond blame. For plants that exploit a natural energy transfer of a particular site, the operating margins tend to be high and stable, and when decommissioning does become necessary it is a simpler and more predictable process. For example, it is quite certain that today's big wind and solar projects will not leave behind huge ponds full of toxic wind ash and whole sites filled with "low-level" contaminated materials giving off dangerous secondary solar radiation.

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[canajin56]

Sand?

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[h4rr4r]

What exactly do you do with the exhaust from this thing? If you're just venting it that is a cost you are imposing on everyone else for your cheap power.

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[h4rr4r]

What exactly do you do with the exhaust from this thing? If you're just venting it that is a cost you are imposing on everyone else for your cheap power. Why should I pay for your power?
This has far fewer externalities.

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[rogerz]

You forgot about land use opportunity cost. At this efficiency, they would need 6 x 10^6 square meters of land to reach 1 GW. That's 2500 meters on each side of the square! A typical nuke plant can *easily* be sited on a 500m x 500m square of land, and that counts parking lots, guard houses, etc. That savings of at least 4 x 10^6 square meters of land can mean lots of industrial or other productive capacity that you are forgoing with the solar energy source.

The point is the ~ 1kW/sqm from solar is way too dilute to be a practical source for our large scale energy needs.

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[spitzak]

And to make gas turbines you need........

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[sjames]

Windex

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[barv]

I disagree. This has greater externalities.

The installed cost of something engineered is a rough approximation of the energy consumed in the making & installation. (You might think that labor does not have a carbon cost, but think about it.)

So let me turn that around. Why should I pay for your power?

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[QuantumG]

The numbers are normalized to a GW, I said that.

Read next time.

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[sumdumass]

IF you are wanting to spend extra money on generating power, then by all means do it. Just don't impose that onto others. As far as venting the exhaust, the chances are that you will never be effect by it so it's not pushing anything onto you personally. Or are you one of these people who get pissed when someone drive's their car a couple blocks instead of walking because you think they should live the way you want them to?

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[sumdumass]

Damn dude, settle down.

I mean it isn't hard to pay attention to the news and know that reactors like the Japanese Tomari-3 which was started in 2003 and came on line in 2009 and is in commercial operation today only took about 6 years to build. That was a genII reactor too. The genIII reactors are supposed to be quicker.

Here are a few more like the Yonggwang south korea reactors 5 and 6 which was started in 1995 and came online in 2002 (still below the 10 year mark or has my third grade math failed me?). Those are just a couple. I could list a whole bunch more that has started construction around the world and are expected to be online within the 10 year mark the op was talking about. But hey, I guess you have a google finger too.

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[dbIII]

OK, you've got me curious now - is QuantumG one of your other accounts and are you actually giving me a serious reply now instead of your usual silly stuff designed to make people angry?
I also asked about naming the plant with that cost.

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[Rogerborg]

Fear comes from ignorance. I'm fully prepared for the coming zombie apocalypse - I plan to feed them the ecomentals' brains, then watch them starve.

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[thegarbz]

At what point did I say it's green? I only said it's expensive and uses a lot of realestate which may not be available for a lot of places that want such a small amount of power. Though natural gas produces half the emissions of brown coal, and combined with HRSG produces less than 1/3rd of the emissions.

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[sumdumass]

NO, QuantumG is not one of my aliases.

And No, I don't make comments designed to piss people off. However, that is often the effect when they find out their reality or opinion is wrong or simple doesn't make sense in the real world.

Here is a good source of reactor information. Here is another source of reactors as of 2010.Be cautious because they don't clearly date their articles so it might be a few years old and all you have to do is search for the reactor names and find out if they are under construction still or built and in operation. And yes, I do understand that it is a propaganda site pushing nuclear power as it's the website of the nuclear trade organization claiming to represent the world. But that is where the information is and you can simply search for them in google and find independent sources on the costs and operations.

Now if costs is a concern, then I suggest you take a look at this wikipedia article. Yes, I know it's wikkipedia but it's referenced and you can validate the claims with a simple search is you choose to. But if you notice the costs estimates which include actual costs, you will see that cost is highly influenced by the country of installation as well as type of unit. Most are within the op's price range, some are over it. With units like the GenIII AP1000 units, the buildings are pretty much modular and construction costs can be controlled pretty well. But as you notice with their installation in Vogtle, the cost is not only higher by about 4b, but a transmission line upgrade of about 3 billion had to be installed too.

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[Anonymous Coward]

It's less than 8 acres, which isn't that huge an amount of real estate. Also, with modern power transmission infrastructures, it doesn't have to be located close to where the power is used. Five MW will power something like 5,000 homes, so around 600,000 of these could power every home on earth (if everyone on earth lived in a typical US home), using up around 5 million acres or around .014% of the worlds land area. For the land to build them you could use ecologically devastated land, not good for agriculture or living on. For that matter, provided you shielded the roof properly (molten salts could be a bit of a fire hazard) you could build on top of existing buildings or new construction.
Assuming that the cost of this installation is typical and not vastly overinflated by politics and the fact that it's a prototype as many other posts have suggested, which it probably is, the cost to build these to power the whole world would be $36 trillion, which is a fair chunk of change, but it can probably be amortized over about 20 years (let's imagine the operating costs fit into that initial $60 million, which isn't too unreasonable since the $60 million for this one is probably overinflated), so it's something like $1.8 trillion a year, which is pretty reasonable to provide US standards of electricity to everyone in the world (Around $260 per person per year, or $22 per month). So, basically, it's competitive with other forms of power, doesn't really need much real estate and has pretty low environmental impact.

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[Anonymous Coward]

And for $0 plus the cost of food, I could feed myself for the rest of my life. How about a little math? You can get about 4 kilowatt hours to the liter at the really high end of efficiency. So, you'd use about 1,250 liters per hour, or 10,950,000 liters per year which at say $0.70 per liter would cost around $7,665,000 per year. This solar plant should be good for decades with maintenance costs that should be a lot smaller than the construction cost. Your petrol generators will probably need a lot more maintenance and will cost a lot more in the long run. If you need 5 MW in a hurry for some specific, short term, application somewhere that you can't just hook into the existing power grid, then your petrol generators are a brilliant idea. For practical long-term power generation, your ideas are just impractical.

Re:Solution To Your Problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the offer, but we don't like fucking disease-riddled manwhores around here...

Re:Conversions...

[mark-t]

30,000 square meters = 3 hectares = 7.41 acres = 0.012 square miles.

Re:Conversions...

[rufey]

Except 30,000 square meters is about 0.03 square kilometers according to Google.

It comes out to be about 7.5 acres, or 0.0115830648 square miles.

18.5 square miles would be quite large and cover an area slightly larger than 4 miles by 4 miles. That would be quite large.

Re:Conversions...

[phliar]

30,000 square meters = 30 square kilometers = 18.5 square miles

Whoa there, buddy! I know a meter is large, but not that large! 30,000 sq m is the area of a field that is 150 m by 200 m. Which is about 500 feet by 660 feet.

Nothing new : France use molten salt solar plant s

[Anonymous Coward]

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrale_solaire_Th%C3%A9mis

Proof of concept?

[T Murphy]

So in other words, they are seeing if this design is worth it's salt?

Re:Proof of concept?

[Anonymous Coward]

:( slashdot never lagged on me before, ergo doublepost. Quick, someone come up with a joke about this power plant somehow duplicating things so I dodge the impending redundant mod.

Yeah this is OT; posting AC to reduce visibility- saves you a mod point to spend upping someone else.

Proof of concept?

[T Murphy]

So in other words, they are seeing if this design is worth its salt?

$$ per watt

[theshiznojudge]

5 megawatts for 60 million euros (12 euros/ watt) doesn't seem worth it with photovoltaic around a third the cost, especially with the advent of mass producing polymer cells (much cheaper)

Re:Conversions...

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, no. 30,000 m^2 = 30 km^2.

its much cheaper in reality

[gedw99]

The costs for this plant are very high of course because its a new thing.

This simple power point PDF reallyshows the numbers of the solar thermal salt plant in spain that is run as a research plant.
http://www.dlr.de/tt/Portaldata/41/Resources/dokumente/institut/thermischept/Solar_Thermal_Energy_Storage_Technologies_Hannover2008.pdf

They actually concluded that Salt is Not the only option. The problem with salt is rust, and so you have to use carbon coating on all the steel parts, which makes it expensive.

Simple using concrete was a very attractive option also.
And then that means that hemp concrete is also possible which is much cheaper again.

Re:its much cheaper in reality

[gedw99]

This technology was used by a frnech female architect over 30 years ago for her projects. She used moltent salt for solar thermal storage in residential homes.

so its funny to realise that its simple and nothing new.

if you look at the design of the large Andasol plants they are the saem design as the solar thermal plant you hva in your house, JUST bigger and using hot stream, rather than water.
And of course have a steam turbine.

The other thing going on is the use of ceramic parts for the turbine. This removes the issie of the steam turning to water, and then rusting the turbine.

so, MUCH of the issues with getting the cost down is handling the rust issues with boththe wolten salt and the turbine.

Re:its much cheaper in reality

[gedw99]

Here is the latest update on Andasol 3.
http://www.tripolipost.com/articledetail.asp?c=11&i=4563

Come on..

[sisko]

What's this Fahrenheit rubbish?

Re:Come on..

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget that Slashdot is populated by lots and lots of old fogeys who still use archaic measurements like Rods, Hogsheads and Cubits in all seriousness.

Re:Come on..

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a German temperature scale used between the years of 1724 and 1742, which is the current era for all US science :-)

Re:Come on..

[Anonymous Coward]

I was born in raised in Omaha, Nebraska.

..but this is Earth. We use metric here. Seriously.

Re:Come on..

[wed128]

Scientists in the united states largely measure temperature in degrees C (or K). Farenheit is only used by common people watching the weather report. that's pretty much it.

Re:Come on..

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, an absolute temperature scale is much more common in thermodynamic analysis.

Rankine FTW!

Re:Conversions...

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, yes.

Re:Conversions...

[glwtta]

Uh, no. 30,000 m^2 = 30 km^2.

Try again, smart guy.

Oh no, it doesn't ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds rather hot, that's what it does!

Re:Conversions...

[Anonymous Coward]

1km = 1,000m
1km^2 = 1,000m x 1,000m = 1,000,000m^2
30,000/1,000,000 = 0.03 km^2

First to use Molten Salt, Bull.

[John Sokol]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Two

Solar Two used molten salt, a combination of 60% sodium nitrate and 40% potassium nitrate, as an energy storage medium

It's not the first

[sxpert]

technically, it's far from being the first. It may be the first commercially operating one though
the first is :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Themis_(solar_power_plant)

Re:It's not the first

[ErpLand]

It's not even the first commercial one. There has been several in commercial operation for over a year in Spain. There have been another 5 opened this year and there are another 25+ in construction. All are generally 50MW capacity too, 10 times the capacity of this one in Italy. Lack of research by the people who regurgitated the press release .... sorry, I mean "wrote the article".

Re:It's not the first

[PybusJ]

As the summary says, this is the first trough CSP using salt as the collection medium - not the first to use salt at all (it's typical to use salt for heat storage). Other parabolic trough systems use oil in the collector tubes.

Yes, but you cannot.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just how clean are *your* mirrors?

some more data

[error_frey]

here's an article (in italian) from a common italian newspaper. In the last paragraph the article says that the plant will meet the needs of 4000 families, saving 2100 tons per year of oil and the production of 3250 tons per year of CO2.

In how long?

[Kupfernigk]

Exactly as with this plant, there will be several proofs of concept along the way to regulatory approval and workable production plants. How long will it take? In the early days of reactors there was little regulatory oversight and a gung-ho approach. Not so now. It's reasonable to assume that this design is unlikely to be in volume production much before 2040 - by which time solar plants will be bigger, cheaper and well established.

On one version of your argument, the Neandertals went extinct because one announced to the other "Ugg go invent fire", and the other one said "Ugg crazy, wait for homo sap to invent central heating"

Re:Conversions...

[Ol Biscuitbarrel]

1,158.3011583011583 sq perches.

PR?

[Anonymous Coward]

This CSP plant adds 5MW to the power station, which is combined [hand wave] with a Combine Cycle Gas Turbine.

Sounds good. What's the total generating capacity? 751MW. Oh. Sounds like green washing...

It's not even the first Molten Salt CSP, Solar One and Solar Two both used Molten Salt.

Oh yeah, 3 miles of molten salt piping!

[Ancient_Hacker]

Try estimating what the basic maintenance costs are for 3 miles of piping that can handle molten salt.

Molten salt is rely, really *corrosive*. Either they're spending tons of money up front on miles of stainless steel, or even more every year replacing the pipes as they corrode away.

Either way it's hard to even break even-- 5MW of electricity is only about $2 million a year wholesale, far less than the interest cost on a $60M plant, and likely less than the cost to maintain 3 mmiles of molten salt piping and collectors.

Re:Oh yeah, 3 miles of molten salt piping!

[foxylad]

Innocent question - by "molten salt" do you mean NaCl or sodium/potassium nitrate?

Re:Oh yeah, 3 miles of molten salt piping!

[Anonymous Coward]

Stainless steel wont come close to cutting it at that temp. I have tried. They will be using Inconel 600. Hugely expensive and difficult to work.

Re:Oh yeah, 3 miles of molten salt piping!

[IAAE]

Yes, some molten salts are very corrosive. I'm working with KCl-MgCl2 eutectic, and when it has oxygen or water in it, it really starts to corrode the stainless and carbon steel that we have, so we have to keep it under an inert (argon) atmosphere to minimize corrosion. Nitrate salts, on the other hand, are actually not very corrosive compared to other molten salts that are being looked at for higher temperature purposes (like nuclear reactors or secondary heat transfer loops).

Re:Oh yeah, 3 miles of molten salt piping!

[evilviper]

Molten salt is rely, really *corrosive*. Either they're spending tons of money up front on miles of stainless steel, or even more every year replacing the pipes as they corrode away.

Liquid sodium has been a common process used in industry for many years, long before it was first put into solar power plants. It's a solved (non) problem.

You forgot something...

[RichiH]

You forgot that

a) nuclear power plants are the only industrial plants in the world which do not need to be insured to the full extent of possible damages they might cause. The insurance industry made politics cap the max at a mere 5 billion Dollar which may sound like a lot, but it's not. The population at large would shoulder those costs.

b) the countries in which the plants operate are charged with long-term storage. So the population at large shells out for that.

A prime example of privatizing earnings and socializing losses if there ever was one.

It's high time we got rid of fission (other than what we need for medical & research reasons). The claimed cost-efficiency _does not exist_. Period.

Re:You forgot something...

[delt0r]

You mind backing that up with figures and perhaps even data. Solar thermal as this plant demonstrates is really expensive. I mean 60M for 5MW? Nuclear has plenty of costs and it may not in fact be economic. But neither is solar or wind without massive subsidies that the population at large shells out for.

Re:You forgot something...

[RichiH]

While that is not hard data, this plant has been in the works for about 20 years under several different governments. Sicily means that a large, if not the largest, part of the money went to Mafia bribes and related costs.

Point in case, the southern half of the cross-italian highway costs _more_ than the northern half even though there are literally dozens and dozens of tunnels in the North.

The guy who started it all became fed up with waiting and built a few smaller-scale plants in Spain within a few years.

Finally, while this technology is not old, industry-scale application of it is. So there are one-time and pioneer costs involved.

So yah, this plant may not have been cheap; but the cost is certainly inflated due to various circumstances.

Re:You forgot something...

[c6gunner]

It's high time we got rid of fission (other than what we need for medical & research reasons). The claimed cost-efficiency _does not exist_. Period.

Pha! Tell to the US aircraft-carrier-and-submarine fleet!

Re:You forgot something...

[RichiH]

I was obviously talking in the context of normal power plants.

And while nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines certainly have a longer range (in theory. aircraft carriers still need a shitload of support vessel which run on oil), do you have any numbers in that direction? /me would be interested.

Re:You forgot something...

[GooberToo]

I saw a documentary not long ago. They talked about the fact that one of our nuclear subs hadn't needed to be refueled in twenty plus years.

Nuclear is extremely cost effective so long as scaremongering twits stay out of the political spot light. As such, the reason insurance caps exists is because anti-nukers were specifically attempting to create an environment where nuclear is uninsurable. Such scare mongering is literally why "NUCLEAR MRI" was simply renamed to "MRI". Otherwise people would literally risk their health to avoid the scary "nuclear" word. When scaremongering has been so extremely abused, the government does have an important role to play for such critical infrastructure (power, not medical). To be against this means you should also be against FDIC insurance, FEMA, and even the US military; including the Coast Guard and National Guard.

This is actually one of the areas where the government should shoulder part of the burden; especially the US government. The US military is the largest single consumer of oil in the world. As such, they force the price higher for all of us. Its not unreasonable for them to shoulder some of the potential financial burden such that it then allows for the price of electricity to be not only significantly lower and safer, but also extremely reliable.

As an interesting side note, Obama could have actually stimulated the economy with massive military energy modernization projects. Some estimates suggestions as much as 50% can be saved. Which for the US is EXTREMELY huge amounts of oil and money, especially when we have active, deployed forces. You need to keep in mind, much of the US military is still running on turbines and diesel engines designed and built during the late 50s to the 70s. HUGE strides in efficiency and power have been created since then. Best of all, such programs would stimulate almost all levels of the economy (white to blue collar) while making HUGE strides to decrease our dependence on foreign oil and lower the general public's price at the pump. Good thing we got more of the same, with one exception, they called it, "change."

Re:You forgot something...

[Myrv]

And the oil industry has a cap of $75 million on the possible economic impact of their mistakes so I fail to see your point. If the gulf has taught us anything it should be that fossil fuel usage can cause disasters just as bad, if not worst, than nuclear energy.

As for nuclear storage, as others have pointed out, spent fuel can be recycled. The same can't be said for the waste products of fossil fuels. At the end of the day society pays a price for all our energy usage.

Re:You forgot something...

[Anonymous Coward]

For what do we need subs and carriers again?

Re:You forgot something...

[RichiH]

> I saw a documentary not long ago. They talked about the fact that one of our nuclear subs hadn't needed to be refueled in twenty plus years.

Nice. Did they also factor in maintenance and other costs? How much fuel would have the cost of the reactor bought?

> Nuclear is extremely cost effective so long as scaremongering twits stay out of the political spot light.

Sorry, but I will refrain from returning any implicit ad hominem attacks.

> As such, the reason insurance caps exists is because anti-nukers were specifically attempting to create an environment where nuclear is uninsurable.

So you are saying that Tchernobyl cost less than 5 billion even though it happenend in Russia and most of the crap that rained down from it came down east of there thanks to the Passat winds? That is an interesting stance.

> Such scare mongering is literally why "NUCLEAR MRI" was simply renamed to "MRI". Otherwise people would literally risk their health to avoid the scary "nuclear" word.

Many people are gullible, thus my arguments must be wrong. Even though I referred to medical & research reasons explicitly.

> When scaremongering has been so extremely abused, the government does have an important role to play for such critical infrastructure (power, not medical). To be against this means you should also be against FDIC insurance, FEMA, and even the US military; including the Coast Guard and National Guard.

I don't live in the US; the self-hampering paranoia which reigns freely over there is of no concern to me as I refuse to visit such a country any longer.

> This is actually one of the areas where the government should shoulder part of the burden; especially the US government. The US military is the largest single consumer of oil in the world. As such, they force the price higher for all of us. Its not unreasonable for them to shoulder some of the potential financial burden such that it then allows for the price of electricity to be not only significantly lower and safer, but also extremely reliable.

Wow, that is some serious bullshit you have going there. I must admit I smiled while following that logic.
In related news, the US military is (was) the largest single supplier of Helium because they sold of their strategic reserves over decades. We should charge them for keeping prices low.

> As an interesting side note, Obama could have actually stimulated the economy with massive military energy modernization projects. Some estimates suggestions as much as 50% can be saved. Which for the US is EXTREMELY huge amounts of oil and money, especially when we have active, deployed forces. You need to keep in mind, much of the US military is still running on turbines and diesel engines designed and built during the late 50s to the 70s. HUGE strides in efficiency and power have been created since then. Best of all, such programs would stimulate almost all levels of the economy (white to blue collar) while making HUGE strides to decrease our dependence on foreign oil and lower the general public's price at the pump. Good thing we got more of the same, with one exception, they called it, "change."

I note that you are not referring to any other president between the 70s and the 00s. Interesting in and as of itself.

That (almost) no governmental body on earth values long-term savings over short-term ones is a well-established fact.

Re:You forgot something...

[RichiH]

> And the oil industry has a cap of $75 million on the possible economic impact of their mistakes so I fail to see your point.

Interesting. Thanks :)
Though BP has shelled out a lot more than $75 million. And they are actually able to. Different situation for nuclear energy companies.

> If the gulf has taught us anything it should be that fossil fuel usage can cause disasters just as bad, if not worst, than nuclear energy.

While I am really sorry for the US, did you notice that they only call it "the largest ecological disaster _in the USA_"? Let one of the French nuclear power plants go boom and the effects are a _lot_ worse. Also, Africa has had an oil spill of similar size for ages and no one would think of starting to stop it as it's apparently not cost-efficient. And that is on land. Where people live. Not hidden under water by ways of chemicals.

> As for nuclear storage, as others have pointed out, spent fuel can be recycled. The same can't be said for the waste products of fossil fuels.

Wrong. It's easy to process CO_2 into O_2 and C_x. It's just not economically feasible.

> At the end of the day society pays a price for all our energy usage.

I prefer to pay for my stuff in a way that makes sure the ones getting rich from what I pay have to shoulder the costs, as well. Not that I pay them _and_ pay extra for clean-up.

Re:You forgot something...

[GooberToo]

So you are saying that Tchernobyl

First one to mention chernobyl not only loses, loses all credibility, but is immediately flagged for scare mongering. If you don't know why this is obvious, you clearly don't understand enough to even be invoking the name, "chernobyl".

As for much of you other comments, you clearly don't understand economics, a government's role in an economy, are a variety of other factors as to why the comment I provided resolved much of your "concerns." *cough*

Re:You forgot something...

[RichiH]

> First one to mention chernobyl not only loses, loses all credibility, but is immediately flagged for scare mongering. If you don't know why this is obvious, you clearly don't understand enough to even be invoking the name, "chernobyl".

First one to mention Coast Guard not only loses, loses all credibility, but is immediately flagged for scare mongering. If you don't know why this is obvious, you clearly don't understand enough to even be invoking the name, "Coast Guard".

There, I can sound self-righteous without volunteering any facts or even the hint of logic, too. You're welcome.

> As for much of you other comments, you clearly don't understand economics, a government's role in an economy, are a variety of other factors as to why the comment I provided resolved much of your "concerns." *cough*

As for much of you other comments, you clearly don't understand economics, a government's role in an economy, are a variety of other factors as to why the comment I provided resolved much of your "concerns." *cough*

See above.

Suggestion: Let's agree to disagree.

Re:You forgot something...

[Myrv]

Though BP has shelled out a lot more than $75 million. And they are actually able to. Different situation for nuclear energy companies.

The $75 million cap does only apply to the economic impact to any disaster (lost jobs, business, property, etc). The companies are still on the hook for direct cleanup cost which is what BP has mostly paid to date (although typically the direct cleanup costs are the smaller part of any large scale disaster). BP has said they will cover all economic losses as well but it remains to be seen how truthful this is as the costs pile up (there's also the issue of the cap being removed if gross negligence can be proven....)

Let one of the French nuclear power plants go boom and the effects are a _lot_ worse.

Could be. I'm not familiar with French nuclear reactor design. I am however familiar with Canadian CANDU reactors and can say with some certainty they are much safer than most (use unenriched fuel, require heavy water moderation, vacuum building, etc...). Not to say a CANDU accident wouldn't be bad but it would certainly be better than, say, Chernobyl. The point I'm trying to make is nuclear reactors can be built safer. Newer designs, like pebble bed reactors, can not melt down by design. If there wasn't such fear mongering about nuclear energy we could invest in and build these safer reactors. Instead we're stuck with many aging reactors with suspect safety records.

Also, Africa has had an oil spill of similar size for ages and no one would think of starting to stop it as it's apparently not cost-efficient. And that is on land. Where people live. Not hidden under water by ways of chemicals.

Not entirely sure how this helps your argument against nuclear energy. It just goes to show again that oil can be just as damaging as nuclear.

Wrong. It's easy to process CO_2 into O_2 and C_x. It's just not economically feasible.

Yes, you can scrub, sequester, and convert fossil fuel emissions but as you stated it's not economically feasible. Recycling nuclear waste is economically feasible. They already do it in France and Britain. They don't do it in North America for political reasons (not technical or economic reasons).

I prefer to pay for my stuff in a way that makes sure the ones getting rich from what I pay have to shoulder the costs, as well. Not that I pay them _and_ pay extra for clean-up.

And this is my issue with how people think about fossil fuels. We are shouldering the burden of using them. For example increased smog causes more health issues which places extra burden health care which we all end up paying for with taxes (well, outside the US at least). So in truth, we are paying them and paying extra for the clean-up (just in different ways). At least with nuclear energy the problem is fairly well contained and solutions do exist (admittedly some better than others).

Re:You forgot something...

[Anonymous Coward]

Repeating a phrase with word substitution is not an argument.

Re:You forgot something...

[Anonymous Coward]

nuclear power plants are the only industrial plants in the world which do not need to be insured to the full extent of possible damages they might cause

I take it you've never seen a Mexican on a fork truck? It would take mere seconds to plow down ten people and NO our insurance can't cover that (errr, at least not that I am aware of).

Re:You forgot something...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think what he meant about Chernobyl (aside from invoking a playground-style "You just violated one of the secret rules, so therefore you lose!") is that no true Scotsman... See, what you're failing to understand is that Chernobyl doesn't count. Because it was a case of incompetence, not an inherent problem with the reactor, and no-one in charge of a nuclear reactor will ever be incompetent again. Just like, after Challenger, no manager at NASA will ever make incompetent decisions that result in the deaths of astronauts again, so Challenger doesn't count... except that the same thing happened with Columbia when management overrode everyone who was trying to figure out beforehand if the shuttle was badly damaged or not and if they should try an alternate re-entry angle that would reduce the chances of disaster. Oh well, so that's not a good example. How about oil drilling, after the Ixtoc disaster, oil companies will never be so reckless in the pursuit of profits that.. well, except for Deepwater Horizon, and Nigeria on a daily basis, and...
Well, anyway, Chernobyl just doesn't count. So there. And you mentioned it and it's the super secret word you're not allowed to mention when arguing about nuclear power. So we're covering our ears now. LA LA LA LA LA LA!

Please get your units right!

[daem0n1x]

Aren't the posts subjected to revision before being published? Please be consistent with your units! Who can read this mess of standard and non-standard units? Fahrenheits and then square metres and then miles. What the fuck?

Re:Please get your units right!

[Thorhs]

Yeah, exaclty! Why is it that some people can not just stick to the source units? This is coming from Italy, and they wouldn't touch imperial units with a 10 foot pole (pun intended).

Re:Please get your units right!

[daem0n1x]

Better yet, use the standard system by default and then put the US conversions in parenthesis, like in Wikipedia.

Re:Please get your units right!

[pmontra]

Obviously we won't: we don't have scales to cut a pole at 10 foot here :-)

"Really corrosive"

[Kupfernigk]

Very few things are generally corrosive. It depends on the chemistry involved. For instance, dilute sodium hydroxide can be kept perfectly safely for years in mild steel tanks exposed to the air, whereas water or concentrated hydroxide would rapidly corrode them. It's a mistake to assume that even A4 (316), the industry standard, is suitable for everything; there are plenty of things that corrode it.

Having said that, it's been known for a long time that certain austenitic high-chrome alloys resist molten alkali nitrates very well. I would imagine that the designers of this plant have optimised the piping for the salt mixture in use, using the usual lifetime/costs tradeoffs in corrosion engineering. (The same tradeoffs that make it much cheaper, for instance, to make a boat out of steel with sacrificial anodes than out of stainless steel or aluminum)

Re:Solution To Your Problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the offer, but we don't like fucking disease-riddled manwhores around here...

Than how do you explain the obsession with RMS around here?

Re:Conversions... in Soccer fields

[Anonymous Coward]

equals 3 soccer fields

Base load power is mostly bullshit

[TapeCutter]

"when it's produced in bursts, you will have to find a way to store it, which means a loss in efficiency."

Yes, however you're only looking at energy loss in one particular circumstance rather than looking at the overall efficientcy of the system in dollar terms.

Currently coal plants produce too much at night and not enough during the day. This means they waste fuel at nightly lows and have to be supplemented by "busrts" from gas turbines during daily peaks. Therefore (if it was possible**) there's much more value in producing energy that matches the peaks and troughs of consumption rather than trying to produce it at a constant rate capable of handling the peaks, especially if you have to pay for fuel.

The fact is that producing electricity at a constant rate capable of handling the peaks is not how electricity is generated on a commercial scale. All methods of generating electricity are intermittent. The idea that we currently have an efficient steady stream of "base load" power provided by constantly running coal plants is largely a myth created by the coal industry.

Coal plants are shut down for regular maintenance for ~45 days/year. Meaning one redundant coal plant needs to be built for (roughly) every seven coal plants in use. Plus to handle peaks you still need to build gas turbines that will sit idle for 20 or more hrs/day (or "inefficiently" pump water uphill). The advantage with wind, solar, etc, over fossil fuels is that; when it comes to handling the unavoidable peaks you can pump water uphill, (melt salt, whatever), during "bursts" and it will cost you some percentage of nothing in fuel costs.

Sure, windfarms also require maintenance but you can do it one windmill at a time, the whole farm very rarely needs to be shut down all at once.

** = Regardless of how you produce the electricity the most economically efficient answer to the inherent problems of peaks, troughs, bursts and breakdowns is a large well managed grid with built in generation/transmission redundancy and plenty of pump storage capacity.

Re:Base load power is mostly bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Industrial power use is more consistent than residential/office. So the base load idea, while not completely correct contains a kernel of truth. The costs to create coal plants is about 1/9th the cost of creating the solar/salt plant. Not sure what the operating costs are, but I'd assume the solar plant puts a lot less waste into the atmosphere and doesn't result in as much mining. I'd also assume that the solar/salt plants, if they prove out would get cheaper as they scale up in size and as the technology becomes more mainstream.

Re:Base load power is mostly bullshit

[aaarrrgggh]

Regardless of how you produce the electricity the most economically efficient answer to the inherent problems of peaks, troughs, bursts and breakdowns is a large well managed grid with built in generation/transmission redundancy and plenty of pump storage capacity.

Actually, the most economically efficient solution is to eliminate the peaks and troughs. Pumped energy storage has at best a .95^2*.985^2 efficiency (pump efficiency times motor efficiency) or 87.5%. (That is assuming around 10,000HP system; at 500HP you would be about 78%.) That compares pretty reasonably to the sodium-sulfur batteries (87%). In contrast, there is only about a 7-10% penalty for thermal storage (chilled water).

Do agree that the transmission systems need to be in place to make things work properly though.

Re:Base load power is mostly bullshit

[TapeCutter]

"So the base load idea, while not completely correct contains a kernel of truth."

Agreed, that's why I said "mostly" bullshit. Currently a 5MW windmill costs about 1.5 million euros and at that price they are competitive with coal, so the solar/salt thing would have to at least match that kind of price/performance. Wether it does or doesn't it's still a GoodThingTM to see people finnally getting serious about evaluating ideas that have been on the drawing board for decades.

Re:Base load power is mostly bullshit

[sumdumass]

You are sort of there but there are exceptions. There are coal plants that sell peak and double as backups for downed plants being services. Dayton Power and light does this in which they increase the base load of a coal plant during the day by diverting the steam into a cold generator before hitting the cooling towers. The cold generator is a play on words, it's simply a generation system that doesn't need to be superheated as the normal generators are (I think they are between 400 and 700 degree F instead of the 1000 degree F regular temp). Of course they change the line pressure too in order to make it work.

It's not as efficient on the surface until you figure in the costs of peak loads compared to base loads, then it starts to make some sense on plants designed specifically to fill in while others are down.

The idea of a base load actually comes from government regulators and not really the power companies. Regulations state that a power supplier must have 10% excess power capacity at all times to account for surges in use and demand. This is where the base load actually comes from, it's the average load needed per time of day spread over the available generation facilities. The actual production may be well under the maximum base load at any given point in time depending on average historical needs, but the base load is required to be available within a certain time limit. The peak load is when the base load either isn't available at the time to meet the demand without bringing intermediate or demand generation online or buying it from another supplier. This is also why there are differing pricing levels for base power and peak power.

Now I don't think I'm disagreeing with what you were saying, just expanding a little on it. The problem with wind or solar is really with getting the power when you need it and making sure it's available when the wind stops blowing or is blowing too hard or when it rains for ten days straight or a volcano eruption eclipses your view of the sun. My electrical service provider requires a contract for a certain amount of electricity and I have to pay a penalty if my wind generator doesn't provide at least that much and the credit they give for overages isn't all the much either. It's specifically because of these problems and the requirements for base loads why they do it. The provider is a coop utility which means it's owned by the users so we are privy to all the details of the crap. They send letters explaining everything about 2 months before we vote on officers.

"Carbon steel" not carbon coating

[Kupfernigk]

Paper on molten salt tanksThis suggests that you have misunderstood. It appears to be economic to use ordinary carbon steel rather than a stainless steel for the containment vessel, for a cost saving of around 20%. I was too pessimistic in my own post (below).

Re:"Carbon steel" not carbon coating

[gedw99]

Arrg - paper is behind stupid pay-wall.
Why bother referencing it.

you have missed the point.

Carbon steel is just everyday normal steel.
But to protect the steel from any rusting they coat the steel in a PURE carbon based lining.

The only mine for the material in the EU is the Uk. they just re-opened because of world demand.

Re:So how much longer...?

[AlecC]

When they sun goes Red Giant, it will expand to very nearly the earths orbit, or past it. Either way, the earth gets fried: the sun may be cooler, but it occupies the whole sky. So power supplies on earth are not a problem. But that is 4 billion years away. Since we have had distributable non-animal power generation for just 300 years, I think we have enough time to develop something, if we survive.

Re:Bulk power costs

[cblguy2]

Bulk power doesn't sell for residential rates. Residential includes transmission charges, distribution charges, meter fees, etc. It's a bundled service. Bulk power is on the order of 3-4 cents per KWH, if that.

Its not the first "solar" use of molten salt

[Anonymous Coward]

The use of molten salt in large scale solar power plants is not novel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Two

But, I guess it could be the first "collector" type system to use molten salt.

Thermal storage? No.

[goodmanj]

TLDR: Molten salt has zero benefit as a nighttime storage system. Ordinary boiling water is a better choice by a factor of >500.

I can't find good data on the heat capacity of the particular salt used in this system, but heat capacities for salts in general are around 1 J/kg-K.. If you're dealing with a temperature change of 700 K, that means each kg of salt can store around 700 J of heat. To store enough heat to power a typical American household overnight (1 kw x 12 hours), you'd need 61 tonnes of salt.

Now, most power plants use water as the working fluid. The latent heat of vaporization of water means that steam stores *at least* 330,000 J per kg of water in the phase change alone, plus additional specific heat if the steam is stored above the boiling point, which I'm too lazy to calculate.

That means that plain old ordinary water, already used in every thermodynamic power plant ever made, is at least 500 times better at storing heat than salt is.

Re:Thermal storage? No.

[goodmanj]

Oh god dammit. Units failure, I'm off by a factor of 1000, and boiling water and high-temperature salt are actually about equal in terms of heat storage.

Mod parent down.

Re:Conversions...

[cparker15]

Next time, just use Google: http://www.google.com/search?q=30000+square+meters+in+square+miles

Mmmmm, French Fries

[WED Fan]

Molten salt? Cook your frozen fries as you salt them. Efficient, fast, delicious.

Only 5MW?

[vijayiyer]

To put this in perspective, a Bugatti Veyron engine is almost 1 MW. 60 million euros for generating capacity I could set up in my garage for perhaps 50k is pretty sad. What if the same money had been used to pay people not to take a vacation somewhere? I'm sure that would have had a _much_ bigger environmental impact.

Re:Only 5MW?

[TheSync]

Another way of looking at it: "5 megawatts with a field of 30,000 square meters of mirrors"

Typical nuclear power reactors generate 1 GW, = 200*5 MW, thus you'd need 6 million square meters of mirrors (a square of 2.5 km on a side) to match the nuclear reactor.

And, oh yeah, many nuclear power plants have 2 or more reactors next to each other....

12 cents a k/w hr

[The Shootist]

And how long, at 12 cents a kw/hr will it take to pay for this monstrosity.

There is plenty of uranium in the world. Build more Nukes.

Got Salt?

[StikyPad]

The Archimede plant has...more than 3 miles of piping for the molten salt.

Jeeze.. want some FRIES with that salt?!?

Re:Conversions... in Soccer fields

[Beezlebub33]

equals 3 football fields (for non-US).

Missing Euro symbols...

[Firethorn]

Dag nab it, why did slashdot kill my euro symbols? Why allow dollars but not euros? And I'm at work, where they've done something to the browser/proxy server so my preview is useless.

Solar Two, Daggett, CA molten salt solar since1995

[peterofoz]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Solar_Project

In 1995 Solar One was converted into Solar Two, by adding a second ring of 108 larger 95 m (1,000 ft) heliostats around the existing Solar One, totaling 1926 heliostats with a total area of 82,750 m (891,000 ft). This gave Solar Two the ability to produce 10 megawatts. Solar Two used molten salt, a combination of 60% sodium nitrate and 40% potassium nitrate, as an energy storage medium instead of oil or water as with Solar One.

Like always, being done wrong

[WindBourne]

The SMART thing is for this to accept SURPLUS electricity and convert it to heat. IOW, have the salts serve as a reserve of extra electricity, so that it can be converted back when needed. Why do this? Because it will serve as a nice buffer of energy. In addition, it allows more of the solar power to go to day-time energy, rather than being stored for nighttime. Keep in mind that there is plenty of energy at night by current plants.

Re:Solar Two, Daggett, CA molten salt solar since1

[compro01]

The headline sucks. This is the first of it's design. That's a different design. That one concentrates it all on a centre tower. This one focuses the heat on a network of pipes containing the salt.

Absurd

[rkinch]

That's a ridiculous cost of 12 euros per watt, which is about 100 times the cost of a conventional power plant.

5 MW times 10 hours/day (?) is worth about 2500 euros/day wholesale.

So basically you have invested EU 60 million to earn EU 2500 per day, for a gross ROI of 1.5 percent, before expenses and depreciation.

Which is to say, this thing will have earned back its carbon cost in about 100 years.

This must be a very durable plant, what with the MOLTEN SODIUM CHLORIDE and all.

Environmentalism: expensive, shoddy, deadly [Schwartz].

Intermediate stage

[hicksw]

This is just an intermediate stage of a fusion power plant, using the only working fusion reactor in the vicinity.

Still need the best shot

[dbIII]

Anyway, the original poster referred to entire facilities and you mentioned individual units instead of the entire power plant. While there is a lot of construction that can be done in parallel for a thermal power plant there are some things that can't which means it takes a bit longer. However, thanks for the real examples above, and the wikipedia article does give some estimates that look reliable of items under construction. It looks like I'll have to wait until those units are built in China before anyone will give me a real answer for a real plant that has actually finished construction.
Ten years has frequently been given as a estimated construction time for a few recent plants (eg. one in Sweden), but in all the cases I've heard of it was a bit too optimistic (eg. one in Sweden). We're so deep in bullshit in the nuclear debate that estimates from unknown sources are pointless which is why I want to hear about a real plant that really took X years to build and really cost Y dollars in capital cost.
Now do you see what I'm getting at? We've got some nice numbers that all look like they make sense but they are ALL ESTIMATES and we really don't know how reliable they are. We've got more than fifty years of civilian nuclear but nobody here has the guts to try to impress us by naming a real operating plant and give us real capital and operating costs along with real instead of potential output. That's why I want to hear about Acme A or whatever, the best operating civilian nuclear plant on earth and how good it is.

Re:Still need the best shot

[sumdumass]

For most all practical reasoning, we won't see a whole lot of new sites for nuclear power. This is because everyone and their pets are afraid they will end up glowing in the dark. for this reasoning, you will find the most nuclear power expansion going into existing and already approved sites where getting the neccesary permits and such are easier (unless you're in a dictatorship country like china that can just make a decision and forget what the people think about it.).

The Westinghouse AP1000 and it's successors (Which I believe the china ones are) are supposed to be able to be built modular in three separate units that are primarily built off site in controlled environments and linked together on site. What's interesting about the AP1000 is that it's not only fail safe, but it can operate completely in the dark during an automated shut down from an emergency or something. It uses a passive cooling technology on top of active cooling and in the event of a disaster, it will shut down and can do so for a number of days without any juice going to the active cooling systems at all. The design is supposed to shut down if a signal isn't updated by human interaction every so often or if the signal is severed.

Anyways, when these came about, the target build for them because site prep was minimal, was less then five years before testing the generation spin up. These follow the Generation 3 safety protocol and once the gen 4 is out, they will be upgraded in design too. Anyways, the idea of this type is that the command and control parts can be built and shelved or used for other purposes and placed on site as needed so that all that is needed on site is the foundation work, a few concrete troughs for the connecting pipes, and the final assemble of the containment vessel and housing units. This should decrease the time till live enormously. Especially seeing how the command and control centers can control multiple reactors and the pump housing can be expanded after the fact by just tying another unit to it.

This should make it shorter to build and if the two non vessel chambers are already in construction and being used in other projects, it should reduce the costs significantly too. Time will tell but it's poised to drop costs significantly if something doesn't crop up in the middle.

Re:Still need the best shot

[dbIII]

This is because everyone and their pets are afraid they will end up glowing in the dark.

That's being overly simplistic because almost no civilian reactors are being built in places where nobody cares if the general population glows in the dark. There is still a very long way to go before somebody will decide they can make billions putting a nuclear power plant in the Phillipines or somewhere for electricity to produce aluminium, titanium or a similar procuct made using a lot of electricity. It's still firmly in the realms of government that can afford to lose a lot more than they gain.
I'm hoping that will change, but it's not going to change without trying out new technologies instead of just hoping that a paper copy of a paper copy of a tiny 1950s sodium reactor is going to work a lot better than real French, Russian and soon Indian reactors do.

Re:Thermal storage? No.

[howzit]

This is HIGHLY CONCENTRATED BRINE. It's 'normal' state is a SOLID. Therefore it can absorb much higher temperatures and can be pumped into well insulated silo-type storage during the day BUT if a fault happens with the pumps etc. the brine will solidify, then how would you reheat this to such a high tempreture to liquify it again? Also, this is not 'to make electricity at night', it is soley for STORAGE, as one would store electricity in a battery for later use.