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Nuclear Energy Now More Expensive Than Solar
js_sebastian writes "According to an article on the New York Times, a historical cross-over has occurred because of the declining costs of solar vs. the increasing costs of nuclear energy: solar, hardly the cheapest of renewable technologies, is now cheaper than nuclear, at around 16 cents per kilowatt hour. Furthermore, the NY Times reports that financial markets will not finance the construction of nuclear power plants unless the risk of default (which is historically as high as 50 percent for the nuclear industry) is externalized to someone else through federal loan guarantees or ratepayer funding. The bottom line seems to be that nuclear is simply not competitive, and the push from the US government to subsidize it seems to be forcing the wrong choice on the market."
Except during nights.
Of course the same people would be arguing that oil and gas are the way to go.
Nuclear power offers the advantage of massive energy production on a small area of land, giving it a high W/skm rate. The ideal solution probably lies in the intelligent combination of several powering solutions depending on the zone type, energy demand and area coverage...
Yeah, and what about coal? Fossil fuels are still by far the cheapest ways of getting / storing energy. (I recommend reading "Physics for future presidents", which lists and explains the reasons for our "love" of oil/gas/coal).
I'm not arguing that we should use coal, but rather that a free market is inherently not (always) in line with protecting the environment. Sure, in the long run fossil fuels will become more expensive and "green energy" more affordable. But in the meantime, the government has to make sure that the industry doesn't destroy the environment. International treaties (Copenhagen, I'm looking at you) would have been a first step.
But in cold and rainy climates, especially when electricity is used when it's cold outside (as opposed to when it's hot outside), nuclear can be much better than solar.
Utter bunk. See http://atomicinsights.blogspot.com/2010/07/gullible-reporting-by-new-york-times-on.html
The plants in the US are ancient one-off designs. Small wonder they don't compare well.
TCAP-Abort
I'm sure that the amount of regulation in plant creation, "green" subsidies for solar and "politically correct" as opposed to "environmentally correct" disposal of waste serves to distort the true price of these sources.
Besides, anyone who has played sim city knows that nuclear is much cheaper.
That depends on how the grid is interconnected.
There is always day somewhere.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Unfortunately this reasoning doesn't take into account that there are severe health and environmental costs from other forms of power production. When you take into account acid rain, global warming, air pollution, respiratory health effects, environmental damage from mining and oil drilling, and damage to the global ecosystem, Nuclear is likely to be far cheaper over the long term than most other forms of power. You have to look at the total cost of the technology, including obtaining and processing fuel, generating power, emissions, waste disposal, and costs to deal with externalities such as the effects mentioned above. When you take all of this into account, nuclear and solar are a bargain.
"Fantastic for those who live in sunny states."
Yeah, it would be handy if there was some way of moving electricity from one place to another. Some sort of national grid service where power can be routed from the place it is being produced to the place it is required. I'm sure someone is working on something like that...
catch (HumourFailureException e) { e.user.send("You, sir, are a humourless idiot."); }
... is the reason why the solar (and wind) energy has to be supported in most of the Europe, and energy corporation has to buy it for twice the price as energy from other sources !
why the citizen must be subjected to teraherz imaging, loss of privacy, a bureaucracy that in the name of national security can stop whatever investigation, the expenses for armies going around the world to fight terrorism, while the industrial complex can build plants that pose an incredibly high national security risk with government subsidies right at home.
I have nothing against nuclear if the cost per kWh includes all the expenses for insuring, securing the venture from all likely dangers and dealing with nuclear waste while it is still radioactive/toxic. It currently doesn't. Solar has ALWAYS been better than nuclear because you don't have to guard used panels for thousands (millions? billions?) of years. Nuclear just put us into more debt.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
For cold climates, active solar water heating systems are a good alternative.
Read more here.
And by the way, in Germany on sunny days there is more electricity produced by photovoltaics than by nuclear reactors.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
I just had a reactor fitted to the south side of my roof aswell!
That is true, however a worldwide power grid would be incrediblly expensive to install. Joining america to eurasia would require either long undersea runs or long runs through inhospitable places like sibera.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Check out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solar_thermal_power_stations
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_stations
Now considering that one nuclear power station usually generates 1 to 5 GIGAwatts, and these generate in the order of TENS OF MEGAwatts, it is inconceivable to me how anyone can compare Solar to Nuclear.
Silly me for not reading the article.
This compares the photovoltaics and nuclear reactors, and it seems photovoltaics are becoming cheaper. Active solar water heating is even cheaper and more efficient - as long as there is sun.
Never knew photovoltaics are more "popular" than nuclear energy in sunny days
Where is it cheaper? Cheaper than nuclear in the north of England, or just in the southern United States?
Hydro dams or wave power, possibly cheaper than nuclear near Manchester. Solar... not so much.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
There are already power lines in Siberia. There are even oil pipelines there.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
So do alkaline batteries, but both are very inefficient and very, very expensive when all the costs over the lifecycle of the mass used in the product are counted.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Until we get superconducting interconnections, there will be massive efficiency losses.
Perhaps advancements in superconductivity is what will finally kick green power sources into a gear?
On which timespan?
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
We have an energy DISTRIBUTION problem. The problem lies in moving the energy from where it's cheap (sunny areas for solar) to where it's needed (e.g. the cold north). So subsidizing solar isn't the whole solution unless you also start subsidizing enhancements to the electric grid. Like changing it from AC to DC to reduce energy loss.
That is true, however a worldwide power grid would be incrediblly expensive to install. Joining america to eurasia would require either long undersea runs or long runs through inhospitable places like sibera.
If we keep up with global warming it might be tropical
I wonder how happy the Not In My Backyarders are right now.
Yes very thank you.
Nuclear, an awesome power source is now more financial suicide than anything else.
Woa, I never opposed nuclear power-stations. Only those in my back yard.
I hope you all enjoy spending your nights in the dark, that is until fusion comes along and you try to kill that too.
No, lets have them. Just so long as they aren't in my back yard
It factors in the subsidies for solar energy. Compares an absolute discount price of solar to the average of nuclear power, ignores the fact that nuclear energy is a constant supplier etc.
In short: sensational and bogus.
I think the rebuke mentioned earlier should be read as well: http://atomicinsights.blogspot.com/2010/07/gullible-reporting-by-new-york-times-on.html
If you're transmitting it from a place where it's summer to a place where it's winter, or from a place where it's noon to a place where it's midnight, you're going suffer pretty bad losses in those long long cables.
Unless you've invented a practical, economic room-temperature superconductor. In which case, send us a postcard from Stockholm. Sign it "smug asshole" - we'll know who it is.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Now considering that one nuclear power station usually generates 1 to 5 GIGAwatts, and these generate in the order of TENS OF MEGAwatts, it is inconceivable to me how anyone can compare Solar to Nuclear.
You forgot to consider the costs of building and decommissioning the power plant. A solar plant can be built and operational in a couple of months (or a couple of days if small-scale), with decommissioning taking half that. A nuclear plant takes 3-5 years to build and several hundred years, if not thousands of years, to decomission.
You need to factor in the whole life of the project.
I still think nuclear wins, but it's not a trivial choice.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
It's dead easy to kill fusion:
Explain to the Luddites about neutrinos. A fusion plant produces massive quantities of them that are free to radiate into the environment and no attempt is made to shield them. Not only that but there have been studies that show that neutrinos can transmute matter and therefore are a possible cause of cancer. No studies have been conducted about the effects of neutrinos on young children's development and so far all subjects exposed to neutrinos have later died or showed effects of cell degradation.
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
Just because the follow-up costs of nuclear energy are consequently ignored in those calculations it has been so cheap so far. While the costs of the solar panels, installation, etc. is to be fully covered by the one installing it, the nuclear waste is handled by the government and so is the insurance.
Calculate the full costs, including recycling, insurance and the like and there is hardly any power source that's more expensive than nuclear energy.
Now considering that one nuclear power station usually generates 1 to 5 GIGAwatts, and these generate in the order of TENS OF MEGAwatts
The Mojave plant already produces over 300 megawatts, the plant in Spain produces 100 megawats, and there are plans for solar plants of half a gigawatt to about a gigawatt. The Topaz Solar Farm in central California is supposed to produce 550 megawatts, and cost around a billion, which is steep but pretty comparable to the skyrocketing price of nuclear power. It's a PV installation. Of course solar only works during the day, but that's when demand is by far at its peak (especially in central and southern California) and customers pay the highest prices.
Why does the plant capacity make a difference, anyhow? Cost seems like a much bigger issue than capacity. If you can build and operate ten 100 megawatt solar plants for the cost of building, operating and decommissioning one 1 gigawatt nuke plant (and insuring it for liability, and dealing with its waste), why not go with solar?
I think real advantage solar offers over nuclear though comes from photovoltaics, which are also just starting to become practical, especially in warm sunny climates where peak summertime power rates spike. I think subsidizing the deployment of rooftop panels atop homes and businesses in places like California and Texas is going to be a more cost effective strategy than sinking tens of billions into nuke plants, and it'll help to advance a technology that could conceivably lead us to near total energy independence.
It also gets a chunk of power generation out of the hands of the enormous energy conglomerates and into the hands of the people, which'll make it much more difficult for the powers that be to play games with the price of electricity on the spot market, a la Enron. And moving power generation much closer to the source of demand could ultimately reduce the overall peak summertime load on our power grids (at least here in America), not to mention the drastic cut in transmission losses.
What is its price compared to uranium?
Choosing the lesser of two evils is a choice for evil.
Fantastic for those who live in sunny states. A lot less great for those of us who don't.
So what? You can at least use it in sunny states then. Just because you have found some place on the map where solar is not practical doesn't mean that the whole idea of solar energy shouldn't be ignored for the rest of the world. It is like saying that solar power is useless because the Amish don't need electricity.
You build whatever is practical for a given location. If their calculations are true, this just eliminates one factor that was against solar power previously. Simple really.
That's because Germany has long have had an anti-nuclear stance, while actively promoting solar energy. Even they are reconsidering on keeping nuclear plants open for a longer time, in the wake of economic realities.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Solar power needs to be stored in some kind of system and released at night, otherwise it is not in the same category as nuclear power and cannot be compared. Not to mention that TFA is apparently completely wrong about costs too as one poster noted.
I was always under the impression that nuclear power was a way to get access to knowledge and materials for buildning bombs, not really for electric power. It has never been worth the cost if you calculate the price per Kwh over its lifespan, including waste handling and other often hidden costs.
The US knows this as does the rest of the countries that has nuclear power. I suspect thats one of the reasons the rest of the world scoff at Iran when they say they only want nuclear reactors for generating power.
HTTP/1.1 400
A bicycle it's the most energy eficient method of transportation that ever existed ... still, as cool as it is (I go to work by bicycle everyday), it can't replace other transportation.
Now, the same it's true about solar power. Let's do some maths. A Nuclear reactor, produces 500 MW in an area of about 1 Km^2. To produce the equivalent to that, under optimum conditions (in the tropics during the day, at noon), we would need. 500000/52 -> 10 Km^2 of solar panels. Well, in fact the average in Earth, taking into account that there is night, and that most of the biggest spenders of energy are at high latitudes, and that you loose quite some energy in sending them to batteries and then get it back from it for using would be less that 1/10th of that energy (at the best), so, we would need about 100 Km^2 of solar panels PLUS batteries (I would like to use electricity during the night) to get the same as I would get from a single nuclear REACTOR ... it's not even a nuclear plant, that can have 3-5 reactors.
So, yeah, it can be cheaper, but I want to see you getting space to build that near a big city. The only way it would be to install solar panels in every buildings rooftop. But well, it would still be enough and you would need to buy the batteries to accumulate during the day. In the end, nuclear is the best option. I know people are afraid when they hear about it, but it's time to let old gosts go away and embrace the future.
The report compares running costs of a solar plant against the running costs of nuclear PLUS construction costs. Not only that but also chooses the most expensive plant designs, and takes the extremely high end estimates.
Taken from http://energyfromthorium.com/:
Fuel costs. Thorium fuel is plentiful and inexpensive; one ton worth $300,000 can power a 1,000 megawatt LFTR for a year – enough power for a city. Just 500 tons would supply all US electric energy for a year. The US government has 3,752 tons stored in the desert. US Geological Survey estimates reserves of 300,000 tons, and Thorium Energy claims 1.8 million tons of ore on 1,400 acres of Lemhi Pass, Idaho. Fuel costs for thorium would be $0.00004/kWh, compared to coal at $0.03/kWh.
Capital costs. The 2009 update of MIT’s Future of Nuclear Power shows new coal plants cost $2.30/watt and PWR nuclear plants cost of $4.00/watt. The median of five cost studies of molten salt reactors from 1962 to 2002 is $1.98/watt, in 2009 dollars. The following are fundamental reasons that LFTR plants will be less costly than coal or PWR plants.
I would rather be ashes than dust!
Thanks to extensive lobbying by the nuclear plants' owners and an extremely pro-business party being in power, actually.
(+1, Disagree)
That's because Germany has long have had an anti-nuclear stance, while actively promoting solar energy. Even they are reconsidering on keeping nuclear plants open for a longer time, in the wake of economic realities.
You mean, they are considering it because the political party has been bribed enough to consider it.
So yes, maybe it's cheaper, but it wont give you any power during nights.
It's daytime consumption that's the problem no night time consumption. Solar is never going to be the magic bullet that replaces all other energy sources but it has the potential to help considerably reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
"There is always day somewhere."
A lovely sounding line but try actually doing the math.
Unless you have a superconducting grid you lose massive amounts of power in transmission over long distances.
Try powering something off panels thirteen thousand miles away and you'll lose most of the energy in the lines.
And if they do build a superconducting grid the issue becomes that of keeping thirteen thousand miles of superconducting cable cools to the temperature of liquid nitrogen.
If your cable goes underwater in the sea you'll lose a shitload of energy. (magnetic field, conductor etc)
And don't forget that these superconducting grids will be dangerous as hell, if you're pushing enough current through a cable to power north america and any part of the cooling system fails the resistance goes from zero to anything non-zero and your superconducting cable explodes extremely violently.
It's always day somewhere.
unfortunately sometimes that place is in the middle of the pacific and your hundreds of thousands of square miles of solar panels along with the explosive cables would have to be on rafts capable of surviving whatever tropical storms come their way.
It's actually possible to transport electricity via a high-voltage direct current cable over very long distances with only 3% loss each 1000 km.
Not sure where they get their numbers from, I pay 10.5 cents/kWh for power from my local nuclear plant.
Your only looking at the list of established solar plants, look further down the page at the list of "announced" projects where the 2.0GW "Sudan Solar Program" tops the list.
Solar thermal is a relatively new technology on an industrial scale, it's hardly surprising the first plants are small, after all the first commercial nuke (Calder Hall in Sellafield, England) was rated at 50MW when it commenced operations.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I strongly doubt that... There are trillions of neutrinos flying through your head every second. Also, given that they fly though the entire planet without much care, and indeed the core of the sun, I doubt they will have much affect on your DNA. There is no attempt at shielding because it is pointless.
"Like the U.S., France does not have a permanent solution for disposal. The cost of temporary waste storage -- hundreds of billions of euros -- is being passed along to French taxpayers and ratepayers by the state and its subsidized plant operators."
"The only other hope for nuclear would be to subsidize it, and subsidies must increase taxes, deepen the budget deficit, or both. That's not new in America: The fossil fuels industry receives more subsidies than all other forms of energy combined."
Thats like saying "Supercomputer have >100 CPU cores, and average PC has 1-4 cores, so it is inconceivable to me how anyone can compare computing power of Supercomputers with Internet". While nucler power-plant designs are typically centralized (there is possibility for small local plants in theory), solar plants are typically geographically distributed.
839*929
The grid is great. Losses are no more than about 7%.
Under a situation where most of your power production is within 100 mi of where it's going to be used, and far-off power is only used for dealing with peaks.
Wholesale transport of power across great distances is going to require a lot more infrastructure than the current grid has, or you're going to need to be able to deal with crippling losses through incredibly cheap production.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Every nuclear power plant in America (except the Navy's) is a multi-billion dollar, one-off design. The ridiculous way that we regulate and construct such things makes them incredibly expensive and means that we if we develop a problem in one, that knowledge gained from fixing it can't easily be applied to any other reactor.
We should settle on a design that is good enough and manufacture our nukes. Ideally, we could actually manufacture them and deliver them by rail. Then if an issue develops, the same fix would apply to all of them. A pebble-bed design, for example, would be very safe.
Not only that, we could make them automated and small enough that they could be based in or near the communities that they serve and eliminate the losses of long distance transmission.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
Except during nights.
Once we decide to properly handle and contain our radioactive waste nuclear energy won't be even remotely cost effective. The same can be said for fossil fuels.
I believe what our misguided friend means are Neutrons. Direct exposure to them is certainly something to avoid, but they can be captured effectively with water and lithium-6.
Plus they might start interacting with matter more than they used to for some reason and heat up the core of the earth like it's in a giant microwave, causing strikingly Biblical style flooding.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
Trillions of neutrinos pass through you every single day, generated from that enormous ball of radioactive gasses around which we orbit. They react with matter so rarely, that even though so many pass through the earth, we can only detect one or two a day, under the most carefully controlled circumstances deep underground. It's pure luck that we can get one to "transmute matter" enough to prove that it exists.
No, they do not make an attempt to shield the neutrinos that come out of reactors - it would take many times more mass than exists on the Earth to do so. Yes, everyone who has been exposed to neutrinos will die - largely of old age. By your logic, every person who has ever worked in, around, or within several light years of a nuclear reactor should now be dead, since we're not shielding against them.
is working on his next fortune. All existing batteries can only store less than 10 minutes of current energy consumption. He suggests burning existing nuclear waste in a traveling wave reactor. Interesting. http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates.html
You forgot to consider the costs of building and decommissioning the power plant. A solar plant can be built and operational in a couple of months (or a couple of days if small-scale), with decommissioning taking half that. A nuclear plant takes 3-5 years to build and several hundred years, if not thousands of years, to decomission.
I've discovered the perfect solution.
1: Build Nuclear Plants.
2: Decomission after 20 years.
3: Build Solar Plants.
4: Shoot nuclear material at sun.
5: Accolades.
"And don't forget that these superconducting grids will be dangerous as hell, if you're pushing enough current through a cable to power north america and any part of the cooling system fails the resistance goes from zero to anything non-zero and your superconducting cable explodes extremely violently.
I'd agree these superconducting cables have issues, but exploding really isn't one of them. Most modern superconducting magnetic coils and cables are designed around quenching and have copper dump loads built into the cables. The real killer for power is the energy required to keep the cables cool...
IMHO, the solution to solar would be affordable large scale energy *storage* (magnetic energy storage, large vacuum composite flywheels, etc.).
Try powering something off panels 1000 feet away.
When I did solar at my home I wanted to be "neat" and ran the wires very clean and put the batteries in the basement 1000 feet from the panels. I increased my power generation 3X by moving the batteries to a shed at the base of the solar array.
I could have fixed that by selling all the panels and buying high voltage panels and then buying all new gear to handle them... It was massively cheaper to dig holes, pour concrete and build a battery shed that is 1/2 underground.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Aside from now being more expensive, "renewable" isn't exactly the most precise word to use about nuclear energy. There's a lot of waste which has to be chucked away somewhere, still unaccounted for.
don't be ignorant. in the early 1990s germany took
the decision to get rid of all nuclear reactors and rely
on brown coal instead.
since germany has a no (new) nukes policy, but no no solar
policy, the comparison is silly.
conventional nuclear tech
1. uses 10x less of the fuel as a breeder reactor does
2. produces 10x more waste as a breeder reactor does
3. the waste produced lasts 10,000 years (as opposed to 100 years for a breeder reactor)
4. the type of radioactivity from the waste is more troublesome than that with breeder reactors
so that's 10x the power, 10x less waste, and waste that lasts 100x less with less powerful radiation, with breeder reactors
combine that with modern design, not the 1960s era tech that so many opinions of nuclear power are based on. you can walk away from a pebble bed reactor, just everyone at the plant get up and go, and you will have no china syndrome, no meltdown, no danger. modern reactor design is passively safe, not actively safe (that is, requiring constant human intervention to keep from going chernobyl apeshit)
the problem of course, is the word "breeder" in breeder reactors: breeder reactors produce plutonium, which can be used in bombs. that's why they are avoided (except by iran and north korea). additionally, nuclear reactors make fantastic terrorist targets
so what you need is fantastic security at nuclear plants: all inventory tracked down to the gram, multiple layers of security at all intersections with the rest of the world
we use fission as a stopgap measure until we figure out fusion, and put all this nonsense of energy problems and shortages behind us, FOREVER
if we don't figure out fusion, however, we are doomed
solar, hydrothermal, geothermal, biofuel, wind, tidal, wave: cute little boutique sources. nothing more than that. sorry
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Fraud Alert! My guess is that this story is a public relations piece by people who are trying to sell solar energy. Is a Slashdot editor paid to run P.R.?
Read the comment by "BillWoods" posted on "Tue, 2010-07-27 14:19" to the story linked in this Slashdot story. Quote: "Using the same amortization factor that they use for solar, the most expensive nuclear project on their list would produce power for a capital cost of about 11 cents/kW-h, well below even the subsidized cost of solar."
The previous comment, by "Marcel F. Williams", posted on "Tue, 2010-07-27 12:51" says, "The capital cost of nuclear reactors are going to fall dramatically once the US and other countries start to mass produce and ship centrally manufactured modular nuclear reactors. Its going to be extremely difficult for any other clean energy systems to economically compete against small nuclear reactors during the rest of this century for producing electricity and carbon neutral synfuels."
Wow! That was easy! Indicating the falsehood of the Slashdot story only required copying the comments in the linked story.
Or you could go for the easy solution, and use a mirror in space to make the sun always shine on your solar pannels...
In most of Europe, we already have net parity, which means locally generated power with solar panels is as cheap/expensive as what you pay from your electricity provider.
This is not because of the "costs" to generate, but because you also pay taxes, distribution charges, maintenance fees, etc... if you buy electricity.
With local generated electricity you only invest in the equipment and some maintenance, and that's about it.
Study was done with a panel lifetime of 25 years with 90% efficiëncy after 10 years and 80% efficiency after 2 years.
They also estimated your invertor will have to be replaced after 10 years.
Offcourse storage is a problem. But for about 15.000 Euro you can have Lead-Acid batteries to get you going for a few weeks without sun.
They give 15 year garantuee on the batteries.
Off grid is possible, but still more expensive.
Off-grid is becoming cheaper all the time, ans electricity from the plug is getting more expensive all the time.
Someday it will be cheaper to generate, store and use locally (A vilage, not a singel house), than to provide a powergrid everywhere.
The article said the SCIB batteries had many cycles (9000ish), but they made no mention of the shelf-life problem which is the bane of laptop users everywhere. Perhaps they did solve that, but the article didn't say it.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
If you can build and operate ten 100 megawatt solar plants for the cost of building, operating and decommissioning one 1 gigawatt nuke plant (and insuring it for liability, and dealing with its waste), why not go with solar?
If you can pull 1 terawatt out of your ass, for free, why not go with your ass?
The real cost of nuclear power is interrest , amortisation, capital, insurance. The fuel and the production cost *nothing*. Cost of nuclear pwoer all counted
production cost
So it is quite clear to me, if solar *win* one day, it is only because of the heavy burden financially and insurance on the nuclear power. Otherwise nuclear electricity, even counting decommissioning and fuel cost, is dirt cheap. *cheaper* than coal, gas , oil, or whatever.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Dammit, I meant to hit Insightful and somehow hit Redundant instead. Apologies, Windbourne.
The road to hell is paved with Cat 5 cable.
You're about 10 years behind. Modern super conducting is NOT liq N2 temperatures.
Simple rebuke of the silly claims in NYT here http://atomicinsights.blogspot.com/2010/07/gullible-reporting-by-new-york-times-on.html
If solar would really be cheaper than nuclear, why would the governments (in the EU) or the federal government / states (in the USA) need to subsidize solar deployments and consumption?
Slashdot editors failed once again to keep their brains on. Or maybe they knew the post is ridiculous, but they just succumbed to tabloidization: say something ridiculous in the first place then wait for the masses to take the bait and grow the advertising income.
In that case, Slashdot, please take into consideration the following possible posts:
Windows is safer than Unix.
Solar is cheaper than oil.
All Jews are actually Germans.
All Germans are actually French.
All Arabs use Unix.
Some French sell oil to the Arabs (especially at night, when solar is not working).
Vi is better than Emacs
Catalin Braescu
Ofaly.com
That was supposed to be the joke!
I'm well aware neutrinos pass through matter harmlessly in fact a light year of lead would still allow the vast majority to pass through. The point is that a minuscule percentage do happen to interact with matter very occasionally and so therefore everything I said was true.
It's supposed to be taking the piss out of those who would stop nuclear plants because of their radiation and scientists can't deny that you can't 100% shield against radiation, and you can't test on all possible effects and you can't prove a negative.
Meh, this is why I'm an engineer not a comedian...
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
Germany also massively subsidized solar, which may have had an effect on how much it generates.
No studies have been conducted about the effects of neutrinos on young children's development and so far all subjects exposed to neutrinos have later died or showed effects of cell degradation.
Hah. Considering that trillions of Neutrinos are passing through your body every second, I'm going to have to call bullshit on this one. Unless you're intending this as a dihydrogen monoxide type joke - "every person who's ever ingested it has later died!".
Yet another message with biased facts and argumentation from a cocky tree-hugging lefty.
Thanks for that, I'll remember to take my card at Greenpeace now.
But to come back to it, (anf be a bit more thorough than the poster) producing the same amount of energy as a modern nuclear plant would take a solar installation the size of the town of Paris. I doubt buying/using the land was factored into the price of MW.
WOW, that's quite an extraordinary claim about neutrinos causing cancer. Do you have a citation for this?
Because they are not experimental unlike the reactor you linked to.
Nope I meant neutrinos, I know full well the sun produces trillions of them, I know that they are harmless.
I also know that CERN is harmless because cosmic radiation produces far higher energy collisions in the atmosphere every second, but some people still fear it.
I know that my local nuke plant produces gamma radiation that you cannot 100% shield against, yet people object to them because they "emit deadly radiation".
I carry a tritium keyring that has a half life and lights up my pocket with it's radioactive decay.
I use a mobile phone and don't worry about the fact that you can't prove that it doesn't do me harm.
So what I was trying to do was parody those who would pray on the fact that you can't prove a negative and other bits of lack of joined up thinking to sell their particular political cause. Still you can't please everyone...
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
Given their history, I'm quite glad Germany has no nukes.
Interesting. Oil pipelines could be argued as an extremely efficient mode of energy transportation, much more efficient than a global power grid.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
So given the GP's request of "from where its noon to a place where its midnight" that yields 60% energy loss using earth's circumference / 2 / 1000km * 3% and that isn't accounting for HVDC having problems in under-sea installations.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
I look at a lot of data. A lot of data. Here the article presents a graph showing both datasets having a step function in them, which conveniently caused the intersection to happen early. They provide no explanation for the cause of the step functions. When I see data like that, I want explanations or I'm not going to believe it...
The point was they you can't prove that they don't! Look at how the neutrino detectors work that rely on a neutrino transforming chlorine into argon and you have proof that they can transmute matter! You can't deny it, you can't disprove it! So fear the fusion reactors. Wait you say that there's a big neutrino source in the sky so we shouldn't worry? Well there's background radiation and yet people fear the small amount of extra radiation that nuclear plants emit.
See the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide for similar logic...
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
How cold does a superconductor have to be to deliver a few hundred megawatts? How cold is it at the bottom of the ocean, say 10000ft (~3000m) down?
There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
The Germans cheat on Nuclear power use. In particular, they IMPORT a lot of Nuclear-generated electricity from France and the Czech Republic.
Remember "Kernwasser Wunderland" Kalkar?
People loved the idea.. in 1972.
Political alignments and sensibilities shift over the decades. If a megaproject is of such dubious value that it might be shut down before being operational, then maybe this should be reflected in its insurance premiums as well.
skyrocketing price of nuclear power
Could anyone please explain why is the price skyrocketing? Things usually get cheaper when produced in greater quantities
Didnt that stilll lose power going from the batteries to your house?
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
Couple thoughts. First, both prices include subsidies, which are greater for Solar. The article claims removing subsidies means solar would need an extra 9 years to surpass nuclear, but that assumes linear trends continue. That isn't a given. Second, I don't fully understand why nuclear power should get more expensive over time. Have we become more risk averse thereby safety measures more expensive? Extra regulation? Is fuel more expensive now than it used to be?
The conclusion of the New York Times article is :
“The frantic effort of the nuclear industry to increase federal loan guarantees and secure ratepayer funding of construction work in progress from state legislatures is an admission that the technology is so totally uneconomic that the industry will forever be a ward of state, resulting in a uniquely American form of nuclear socialism.”
(Solar also needs subsidy at the moment, but less as time goes by)
> Try powering something off panels 1000 feet away
Convert to AC on the back of the panel. I do.
> When I did solar at my home
Before the widespread use of microinverters, one would assume.
Maury
> Or you could go for the easy solution, and use a mirror in space to make the sun always shine on your solar pannels
How is that easy? We have absolutely no idea how to actually accomplish this, and anyone that says otherwise is lying. We have a 100% failure rate so far.
Maury
In that case we could have swallows carry the line under their dorsal guiding feathers.
I can hardly wait to subsidize yet another big corporation. I was just thinking, I have wayyyyy too much money and I don't work nearly enough.
Waste disposal is a made up problem. That "waste" is very useful. Reprocessing it recovers almost all of the original fissionable mass, and the other products have medical and scientific applications. The remaining low-level crap can be glassified and dropped into a Yucca Mountain like storage depot (except that people's ignorance regarding nuclear waste and radioactivity makes them panic about that).
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
:facepalm:
I saw another study once, that showed that so far all subjects exposed to dihydrogen monoxide have later died or showed effects of cell degradation.
Talk to your kids about the dangers of H2O...
And you provided us with one more piece of evidence that Slashdot can't recognize a joke. ;-)
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
It's disturbing that this is modded "interesting" rather than funny...
You do actually know that solar energy is substantial even when it's not sunny and high air temps, right? Or is are those solar cells in Germany just there for show..?
(Exception granted for very high latitudes where the hours of darkness are extensive in Winter, although the Summer balances this out)
I think that was suppose to be funny (along the lines of banning dihydrogenmonoxide), as you would know if you sent a second googling neutrinos.
(for example, during the night, the entire earth is not enough to shield you from the 50 trillion neutrinos that stream through you every second from the sun)
Now I know why we pay half the price for our electricity from Yellow (German Nuclear Power) than we would if we bought it from SWU (Traditional Recyclable Tetrapak burning) or Eco(windmills, photo-voltaic, CH4 emissions from political parties).
No wait a minute, I read it wrong...
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
Even if everyone here is grumpy and always wanting to argue, isn't this ultimately GOOD news? I think the point here is that the cost of solar is falling. Even if nuclear is currently cheaper as an end-to-end solution, cheap solar is a great trend. If solar energy continues to fall and become more competitive, I would certainly rather utilize that than worry about what to do with spent nuclear fuel, all things considered.
Waste? Land usage? Environmental impact? Recyclability?
We're not allowed to recycle nuclear waste, because we can turn it into weapons-grade nuclear material; but 95% of the energy potential is lost because we don't! Seriously, it's easy to breed more (refined) nuclear material, suitable for energy generation (and bombs), from waste. Treaties say we can't do that, because we might blow shit up with it.
On the other hand, solar panels don't exactly meet the energy demands of a city with an installation the size of a city block. A single nuclear pile can keep a generator turning at full speed; the whole thing is about the size of a McDonalds, with a giant core containment building and management facility and external containment building around it.
Let's face it, we don't have any good answers.
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The data include only PV-generated electricity, without factoring in what is likely the most encouraging development in solar technology: concentrating solar power
They forgot to include another little detail. Cost of land. Because solar panels don't stack well (yet), therefore you do need a huge area to get a significant power output. That area won't be free, and it will require infrastructure - access roads, mounts, fences, etc.
While there is no doubt that solar is getting cheaper, and nuclear (thanks to increasing safety regulations, increasing costs in fissile material manufacture and increasing waste disposal) is getting more expensive; you still can't compare nuclear "cost per kWh" (which includes all those costs, profits, plus the cost of delivering it to you) to the cost of solar panels lying on a shelf in a manufacturer's warehouse. There are a few costs that haven't been accounted for on the solar side. It's apples to oranges.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Hey - I got it!
Another engineer...
Very good! :-D
That figure likely does not include the losses incurred when generating the very high voltage DC from AC and converting it back to AC for consumption.
I've toured the Dalles dam and the Celilo power station - very impressive. Rectifiers that stand 20 feet tall with sci-fi looking knobs and disks, straight out of 50's movies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie
http://www.abb.com/cawp/gad02181/c1256d71001e0037c1256b8000371e41.aspx
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
> Unless you have a superconducting grid you lose massive amounts of power in transmission over long distances
3% per 1000 miles. Even if you haul from one side of the US to the other, it's considerably less than "most".
> If your cable goes underwater
They're building an underwater line from the UK to Iceland as we speak.
Read some more.
Maury
I'm still reading the paper but one thing strikes me right away as being amateurish. The linear interpolation. According to the paper (with just a *little* bit of extrapolation) nuclear was free in ~1997 and solar will be free in ~2023. Nuclear doubled in cost between 2001 and 2005. And there are no confidence bands.
Also it's pretty obvious this paper is not being presented as scholarly research but as marketing material. Check out the cover page. Nothing against solar, but I'm really tired of research with a pov that forces you to pick it apart. Life's too short to do other peoples' work for them. Get credible or get out of my face.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
> It's dead easy to kill fusion
I realize you were posting a joke, but...
Calculate the creation rate of T from a fusion economy. Now consider that a good portion will escape from the reactors no matter what you try to stop it (it travels right through most materials). Now calculate the equilibrium level of T in the atmosphere as a result.
"The AAAS estimated that each fusion reactor could release up to 2x10^12 Bequerels of tritium a day during operation through routine leaks, assuming the best containment systems, much more in a year than the Three Mile Island accident released altogether. An accident would release even more. This is one reason why long-term hopes are for the deuterium-deuterium fusion process, dispensing with tritium."
Let's cut to the chase: no one expects fusion to actually evolve into a usable power source within generations. The US electrical energy industry group (can't recall the name) wrote a longish position paper on the topic and stated in no uncertain terms that they are absolutely not going to use it in the foreseeable future.
Maury
I don't want to live on that planet.
We should reject ALL energy subsidies. If solar truly is the more economical solution, it will win out in the market place.
> Things usually get cheaper when produced in greater quantities
Has car insurance gone up or down in price over the last 50 years?
Up? Even though there are more cars on the road? Oh, wait...
Maury
Coal kill more people each years than nuclear, counting only mining, and release AFAIK much more radioactivity per year than nuclear industry in the surrounding air or environment. The cost of constructing and insuring is high a nuke plant, but disproportional to the actual risk and technology. And that does not even count the cost of NYMBY protest. The bottom line is that those price are inflated to the max. The real *material* cost , of nuclear is really really low. make insurance and NYMBY get more real by public, education and using newest tech, and solar is completely left behind. In other word, there is actually a lot of potential for nuclear to get cheaper, without even a tech change.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Meanwhile, in the little town where I lived in Southern Oregon a few years ago, a Natural Gas 500MW power plant cost something like $80-100 million to build.
If you can build and operate ten 100 megawatt solar plants for the cost of building, operating and decommissioning one 1 gigawatt nuke plant (and insuring it for liability, and dealing with its waste), why not go with solar?
Maybe not all of us want to see every square inch of desert covered in solar panels. Compare the surface area used to generate 1Gigawatt at a Nuke vs Solar...
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
No, that's included in the costs.
Just like maintenance outages are counted into the cost of nuclear. However, the cost of getting the Uranium out of the ground, refining it and the cost of putting it somewhere save are not included.
That is why we need nuclear power. Unless we create a better distributed system of generation.
I would like a MW nuke in my house. Of course I would hate to think what that would cost. To be safest maybe some kind of RTG system.
Unless we change our distribution system we will always need a baseline power generation system to make sure there is enough power flowing.
Nuclear isn't competitive because they're using outdated, inefficient reactor technology, and not using all the fissionable material they have at their disposal. They need to deploy Thorium reactors to boost the efficiency and safety.
However, distributed power generation via solar is absolutely a necessary step forward as well. We're just wasting all the ambient energy by absorbing all that light into our rooftops and parking lots.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
The demand at night is a lot lower. This is a big problem for power companies, because it's not viable to shutdown the generators at night. Stop inventing imaginary problems.
well said
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It compares one kind of nuclear (Uranium in a PWR or BWR) with one kind of solar (solar PV) and ignores other kinds of nuclear such as Thorium and breeder reactors that could make nuclear cheaper as well as the fact that there is no solar technology available yet that can produce baseload power (even solar thermal is not going to produce much output if it rains for a week straight)
My first choice is for nuclear, but solar is a cool idea too. Let's save it.
The problem of solar energy is storage.
Dams are the best way to store electricity in (non flat, high latitude) developed country; they are routinely used in Europe to store nightly excess of nuclear electricity to cover production deficit during the day. They could also be used to damp the non-predictable instantaneous production by solar plants.
There is a second solution to store solar energy: Hydrogen. The scenario is as follows:
- Take a huge desert which has no other environment to save other than a lost rattlesnake per sq km. (If you never did it, try to cross the Sahara: It is absolutely huge and empty.)
- Build a huge electro-solar plant in the middle of that place.
- Build a pipeline to bring sea water to the same place.
- Make hydrogen by electrolysis of the water.
- Bring the hydrogen back to a place it can be shipped through a second pipeline.
Advantages:
- Hydrogen so produced is solar energy stored.
- It would be a step towards the "Post-oil hydrogen-based society" (can be used in cars more efficiently than batteries, potentially usable to fuel planes)
- It would be a source of income for countries with no other resources than sand
- We already know how to build long pipelines.
Disadvantages:
- Maybe cost? (Anybody aware of somebody having done the math?)
(Just make sure: do not forget to close the stoechiometric loop of the atmosphere by releasing the oxygen released at the plant in the air.)
Seriously, instead of complaining that one is more expensive than the other, and "oh crap it's time to switch", lets dig into the real reasons why certain types are more expensive and address those issues.
For Solar, it's not only the fact that you have to produce the panels out of not-so-cheap materials/processes, but also because of the batteries to keep people happy at night.
For Nuclear, there's a lot of red tape, regulation, storage and distribution of waste (which should really just be processed ON SITE), cost of the fuel (which isn't going to get any cheaper while we all stand here arguing a for solar and not producing any more en masse), as well as the facility's and its operation.
Seems like we could address these issues if we just stopped to think about them for a bit. I like solar as much as the next guy, but don't stop working on one fairly green energy production method because a new one is "on the horizon".
It seems to me that most of the cost of solar goes into materials and most of the cost of nuclear goes into stuff we could solve if bureaucrats kept their nose out of it.
-=JML=-
Actually, we could release all of it up into the air and still contribute to less radioactivity than coal burning does. The Yucca mountain stuff is so unbelievably overblown it's not funny.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Sadly, we don't get to have MODERN reactors 'cuz there's far too much NIMBY going on.
When's the last time we brought a new nuclear power plant online in the US? Sometime in the 1970's. I'm sure that materials science and every other major branch of science & engineering have advanced enough that it would be like trying to compare a modern automobile to one from that time frame.
The Digital Sorceress
Except if new insights require the wast to be dug up, like in the German salt mines. This dug up will be paid by the state of course, because it is in the public interest.
According to opponents waste is a problem, according to proponents all the problems can be solved.
Insurance also is such a factor. the first 10 Billion (US situation) is insured by the plants, anything over that would be paid by taxes. Compare that to the cost of Chernobyl ( ~ 235 Billion) or 3 mile island (close to a billion). You will not have to take such insurance on solar power or wind power, (not sure on hydro power).
I don't disagree with any of this but it was my impression that power output for a nuclear or coal or gas power station is the actual output where's the output of a solar power plant is variable and the number they provide is the maximum possible output. As a result the cost per kilowatt from nuclear is the actual cost where's the cost for PV is only accurate if the cell is operating at maximum capacity at all times. Am I wrong in assuming that? Also does anyone know what the average output of a PV cell is as a percentage of maximum even in a sunny place like California?
But still Nuclear Energy is the funniest thing on earth Where is your adventure spirit?
in certain orbits. And its only a few hundred miles away...
I think real advantage solar offers over nuclear though comes from photovoltaics,
That technology is actually the least cost effective, not to mention, generally really bad for the environment. The only reason its starting to be widely used now is because its heavily subsidized. And despite those subsides, it still pales in comparison compared with solar thermal, let alone nuclear.
You're also completely ignoring the fact that nuclear is base load power generation. Its impossible for photovoltaics to do so; after all, the sun doesn't always shine. Its possible but not fully explored for solar thermal to be part of base load.
Basically this means, for now, the only solar technology which is hopeful is solar thermal. And next to nuclear, solar thermal still has a long way to go. Photovoltaics, for the masses, is for people who want to feel good but are not actually helping.
Well, if government subsidies aren't counted as a cost then the answer is simple: Subsidize nuclear 100% and we'll all get free power! Oh wait, you mean it isn't reasonable to ignore the cost in taxes? Really, some people in academia have lost sense of objectivity.
My guess is that the author wrote the title of the article before doing any research.
Sure, the price may drop, but will it drop enough?
I tend to divide this stuff into three categories: Engineering/design, materials, and labor.
I don't see molten salt tech gaining major cuts in materials and labor. You still have to put down the mirrors, make the motors, run control/power lines, build the turbine, aquire all the salt, etc...
Engineering cost should go down, but will it go down an order of magnitude? Likely not.
You'd have to get the plant down in cost to the point it produces power for more like 6 cents a kwh, not 16.
I don't read AC A human right
To boot, fission is a measurably good neutrino source, and we're not all dead yet.
So, you've never heard of pumped storage, or any other forms of grid energy storage, eh?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Unless you have a superconducting grid you lose massive amounts of power in transmission over long distances
True. Hopefully that "room temperature superconductor" comes true one day.
In the meantime though, a lot of power generation already does occur over long distances, though not necessarily quite to the scale mentioned.
As solar becomes increasingly effective, it seems that having a small-yet-efficient local array to offset your energy consumption would be a lot more efficient than a few thousand KM runs to the nearest large supplier.
I personally would love it if nuclear power dropped out of the alternative energy debate, but I don't see it happening, even with this good news.
One thing that retards renewable energy is that it is a lot harder for one organization to control.
Nuclear power, like oil and coal, is centralized. If you want that electricity you have to go to some big org to pay for it.
Investors would rather fund a business where the customers have to keep coming back instead of being sold something that will let them good off on their own.
The Mojave plant already produces over 300 megawatts, the plant in Spain produces 100 megawats, and there are plans for solar plants of half a gigawatt to about a gigawatt. The Topaz Solar Farm in central California is supposed to produce 550 megawatts, and cost around a billion, which is steep but pretty comparable to the skyrocketing price of nuclear power. It's a PV installation. Of course solar only works during the day, but that's when demand is by far at its peak (especially in central and southern California) and customers pay the highest prices.
In the Mojave, which is flat, empty, sunny, and dry -- solar makes a lot of sense. In a place like Michigan, which is flat, not empty, cloudy, and wet, nuclear makes much more sense. In a place like Aruba, which is small, dry, and really windy, wind power makes sense. Solar needs space and sun. Wind needs... wind. Nuclear needs water. Why not build the appropriate facility for the appropriate location?
There are parts of the country for which solar and wind will never be more than niche accessory supplies, because the climate makes their generation unreliable. There are parts of the country too dry for nuclear. So don't build the wrong plant in the wrong location.
"The remaining low-level crap can be glassified and dropped into a Yucca Mountain like storage depot (except that people's ignorance regarding nuclear waste and radioactivity makes them panic about that)."
So we agree that there's no actually-being-done way to deal with the waste.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Odd, I'd think materials and labor would be the area that would see the greatest drop in price. Maybe someone will find a cheaper way to produce the mirrors or motors, and automation could make the labor worlds cheaper. The control and power lines probably aren't really huge areas for research and development, but since I'm not in that industry, I can't say that for certain.
Fission reactors generate huge amounts of neutrinos. Roughly 2.5% of the total energy output of a reactor is radiated away as neutrinos. For a 3 GW thermal reactor, that means around 80 megawatts of neutrinos. If the average neutrino has an energy of 1 eV, that is 5x10^26 neutrinos per second.
The smaller area means it has much less impact on the environment because of the substantially smaller space it occupies. Plus there is less environmental impact in construction, in terms of materials used.
Solar makes a ton of sense in auxiliary power roles (the next time my roof needs replacing I'm planning to get solar shingles) but not as a primary power source, at least not if you want to coat a lot of surface area.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
They're the same thing. You have material that is processed, packaged, transported to where energy is consumed, then picked up and reprocessed or stored.
In the case of fission, you're not creating any energy, just extracting it from the fissionables. After that you have a disposal problem.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Modern reactors are a lot cheaper, simpler and safer than the old ones. That's part of my point, decommission the old Soviet reactors instead of the modern, safe Western reactors.
The fact that the plant outside the core doesn't become radioactive over time helps. But you still have the problem of what to do with the spent fuel. Looking at the so-called test facilities for long term storage, there is a very large energy cost as the result of finding geologically safe places and digging and maintaining the storage facilities.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Why not go with solar? Environmentalists are just starting to try to understand the impact of blocking the sun from all those square kilometers of land.
I do have one question. For what length of time is this solar price quoted? The plant must be rebuilt every 25 years or so as the cells degrade.
Because we still have no practical, general-purpose way of storing energy on those scales. Since we have to generate exactly as much electricity as is being used, this in turn means that we've built the grid to run off of base load plants (those which produce the same power output all the time, such as nuclear) and peak load plants (which can adjust to minute-by-minute output requirements but often use more expensive fuel such as natural gas). The grid can use solar/wind/etc all you want but since nature, not man, controls the output to those, they need to be backed up by traditional peaking plants (exactly how much backup you need depends on how much downtime you can accept).
Solar thermal power can partially work around the problem by keeping a large vat of fluid (usually molten salt) very hot and using that capacity to spin turbines through the night. I think the technique is very promising.
Yeah, except the case you're linking to is a poster child for NOT how to dispose of the waste. Piling up barrels haphazardly into an area where ground water flows in and out is monumentally stupid. That's why I used the word "glassified" and gave an example of Yucca Mountain.
And yet despite the insurance costs, nuclear will still be cheaper and probably more sustainable and will not require a complete reworking of our power network. Solar and Wind require STORAGE capabilities, of which we have NONE. Our power distribution is entirely based on increasing PRODUCTION to meet demand, not STORING energy to offset future demand spikes. Nuclear reactors will fit directly into our current network without requiring any massive changes in how we do things.
Also, don't call up the spectre of Chernobyl. If I wanted to cause billions of dollars of damage via sabotage (which is practically what that event was), I don't need a nuclear reactor to do it. A large chemical plant or oil pipeline will suffice.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
Nuclear power is doing fairly well in China where 20,000 coal mining deaths a year make the risk of a nuclear accident http://www.chernobylreport.org/?p=summary seem comparable. Skimping on safety to compete with coal seems like a poor game to play elsewhere so nuclear power is uneconomical in many other places. Fortunately, solar has much father to fall in price so electricity will be getting cheaper fairly soon and we may see only a few more nuclear power meltdowns since existing plants will be closing as uneconomical as well.
You are forgetting that every part of a solar thermal plant can be mass produced from relatively inexpensive basic materials.
Steel, glass aluminum, copper, salt, mirrors, pipes, electric motors, micro controllers, steam turbines, generators.
The engineering costs are pretty much paid for.
Once mass production parts become available, it is pretty much reduced to contractors leveling the site and placement of equipment.
There will be orders of magnitude reduction in cost for both the engineering and the components.
Yes, I agree, we're being idiots. So let's stop being stupid and SAVE HUMAN CIVILIZATION! The tech already exists, we did it in the past--all that's stopping us is stupid policy decisions, not any technical hurdles.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
Insurance also is such a factor. the first 10 Billion (US situation) is insured by the plants, anything over that would be paid by taxes. Compare that to the cost of Chernobyl ( ~ 235 Billion) or 3 mile island (close to a billion).
First question: What sources are you using for Chernobyl? Second: What year dollars are you using?
TMI isn't as big of a deal - $1B is 'only' around double to triple the cost of decommisioning a reactor that hasn't melted down.
On Price-Anderson: It's acctually around $8.9B for an accident; because of the way Price-Anderson is structured, increasing the number of plants will increase the cap.
Currently Lloyd's charges around $400k/year for $300M of coverage.
Consider the gulf spill, Bhopal, etc... Is there any disaster in the billions where the government doesn't get involved?
I mean, TMI was comfortably contained within the cap, and the Chernobyl plant would have never been allowed to operate in the USA.
BP hasn't managed to bust the cap yet for the gulf oil spill yet, $4B thus far, so they might still manage to.
Still, we're talking about a major, major oil spill here. Increasing Price-Anderson levels might be good, but as you mention, hydro power can carry similar risks - imagine a New Orleans with tens of thousands potentially dead.
The question becomes one of how much risk is there, really? I mean, Chernobyl wasn't even encased in a containment dome, all US reactors have them. TMI DID have a dome - look at the cost difference. $1B vs $200B. TMI happened earlier than Chernobyl and has influenced design decisions since then. We've run simulations involving ramming the domes with a plane - it's a lot like what happens if you run an airliner into the hoover dam - there's a big difference between a concrete pressure vessel and a building.
In the end, I don't want 100% nuclear, but I do want it to be part of the solution. My theoretical mix is something like 40% nuclear(1), 15% hydro(2), 15% wind, 15% solar, 15% 'other'. You use the hydro to help balance out the wind/solar.
1: double that of today
2: Because our hydro power is already around maxed
I don't read AC A human right
convert to AC and then back to DC for storage is bad. You simply Grid intertie.... far different setup. Great but different.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Not like the DC. DC from panels to batteries.. then Inverter creates AC for the home. 1000 foot loss of the 220Vac is very low compared to the DC losses.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Ahh, I see. Just curious, thanks.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
It's dead easy to kill fusion:
Explain to the Luddites about neutrinos. A fusion plant produces massive quantities of them that are free to radiate into the environment and no attempt is made to shield them. Not only that but there have been studies that show that neutrinos can transmute matter and therefore are a possible cause of cancer. No studies have been conducted about the effects of neutrinos on young children's development and so far all subjects exposed to neutrinos have later died or showed effects of cell degradation.
Are you being serious, or are you just trolling? Your entire comment is nonsense.
Trillions of neutrinos pass through you every single day, generated from that enormous ball of radioactive gasses around which we orbit. They react with matter so rarely, that even though so many pass through the earth[...]
Sheldon? Is that you?
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
What's up with that picture? I mean, they just piled the drums up that haphazardly? The plans I saw for the USA would have had the drums at least stacked nicely. Still, it's a storage site for low to medium waste - I'm sure some of those barrels contain some neat(if mildly radioactive) stuff...
Concerns about the area filling with water and contaminating the water supply? I wonder how realistic they are. Germans are reportably fairly nuclear-phobic.
Personally, the last statement makes me lose a lot of my respect for them: "Having dropped below nuclear power, solar power is now one of the least expensive energy sources in America." I also question their data points - seeing as how they go out into the 2020s
Wind has reportably been cheaper than solar for quite some time.
I don't read AC A human right
How do they compare in the measurement of Megawatts per acre?
Of course, the majority of that is due to the amount of red tape a reactor has to produce to be approved. How do they compare when regulatory overhead is excluded from the costs?
Not just one off, but at least 2-3 decades behind the times due to fearmongering. If we had modern nuclear plants (Generation III, or even Generation IV), 16 cents/kwh can be easily undercut, and be able to be done 24/7/365 with support for a beefed up grid system to support electric car charging.
I would like to see the US go France's route. I can see nuclear plants used near the shore to power very large desalination plants, and combine that with decent pipeline technology, can allow for inland irrigation without exhausting the already depleted aquifers. Other uses would be for dealing with the garbage in the Pacific Gyre and using thermal depolymerization to recover usable crude oil which can be used for another round of plastic production.
Wish I had mod points to mod you up informative.
France pulls off their system because Germany buys their nighttime power generation. Germany is roughly the size of France. Canada is roughly 1/10th the size of the USA. See the problem?
The argument that the sun doesn't shine at night is exactly backwards. Demand at night is about half of what it is during the day, and it would be even less except that some industries intentionally run at night because the spot price is cheaper. With solar, those folks would gladly shift to daytime operations.
Nobody has suggested that solar should generate 100% of the power; same goes for nuclear. Given that adding more of either would be perfectly fine in terms of supply-demand grid management, why not go with the choice which is cheaper for that location?
P.S. I have no idea where you get 0.06 USD/kWh from (no citation), but I do love how you take pot shots at the public nature of the organization while still praising their low cost. Clearly, were it not a public organization they'd be selling it for something cheaper, right? Next time you "question the mode of cost calculation in the article," it would be helpful to provide your own contrary cost calculation, eh?
Support a few technologists in Washington.
Unless you're starting from scratch. That isn't reality however. I'd need tens of square metres of panels to cover my hot water and space heating requirements in winter, and the cost of that installed is in the tens of thousands of euros. Or, I can stick with the gas boiler and put the money where it's more effective; insulation.
It'd take decades to pay for a solar (PV or thermal) installation. It just doesn't make financial sense.
And by the way, in Germany on sunny days there is more electricity produced by photovoltaics than by nuclear reactors.
And by the way, Germany imports electricity from France... Where they produce it using Nuclear. The Germans are all holier than though with their nuclear policies, the reality is they have simply offshored their nuclear industry to France.
Deleted
apparently the equipment paid for itself!
Facts are useless, they can be used to prove anything.
There's plenty of freely available surface area, above ground, some tilted toward the sun, tightly positively correlated with the actual consumption of electricity. They're called roofs. There's another giant space which is largely unused by humans -- the SW desert, which is currently being used for concentrated solar, etc. I have no idea what the nuclear and solar W/skm ratios are, but it's not clear to me that they're dramatically different given the massive area around a nuclear power plant which must be fenced off, as well as the area appropriated for mining. Maybe they are dramatically different, but at the end of the day it's simply not a binding constraint since neither nuclear nor solar are taking up land which is highly valuable -- nuclear plants are generally in suburbs/exurbs, and solar is on roofs or in the desert by and large.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
but people do. Or, in this case, bend the heck out of the truth.
... oh, oh ... batteries (costs, environmental impacts, hernias from lifting the heavy suckers)!
The first thing is the "increasing cost" of nuclear is primarily a regulatory factor. The "decreasing cost" of solar is largely due to government subsidies. It isn't hard to make one industry less financially viable than another when the government can burden the "undesirable" industry with higher regulator and safety costs while offering tax incentives and subsidies to the favored one.
Yes, nuclear is more immediately hazardous than the components of solar power and will require greater costs for safety. However, you get plenty more energy out of a single nuclear plant than you will from a solar field ten times bigger.
Did they factor land costs? Taxes on the land and corporate taxes on the land as an asset? Did they factor maintenance? Solar panel life (they do need replacement)? What happens when the government starts more heavily regulating the manufacturing of the solar cells (manufacturing utilizes hazardous materials - and the panels themselves contain some)? After all, manufacturing is dirty and bad for the planet. You know they will come after them.
What happens after dark (when we all turn our lights, washers, driers. televisions, and video games on)? Store daylight power in batteries
If there was money to be made in solar then the energy industry would be running for it like crazy. After all, they're all about money right?
The study included the cost of management, security, fuel procurement, waste disposal, and decomissioning of the power plant -- costs for which the US government pays some or all.
Include those costs, and gee whiz -- the nuclear power plants are getting quite a deal, only paying about 1/3 of the actual cost of their operation.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
WHOOSH!!!!
Right this second on some discussion forum, an ignorant twit is ranting about the unstoppable-super-neutrino-radiation-killing-force that no one cares about that is killing our kids and OBAMA KNOWS!!!!!
And it's your fault. Just sayin'
;)
I think there's a bunch of fudging in this article to help justify it's conclusions.. At least with the West coast, having a solar facility out in the desert, between Los Angeles and Las Vegas would be easy to make, and supply most/all of the Southwests needs. The rest of the county doesn't have that benefit of so much sun, and nuke power will be useful/needed.
What was that study - 91x91 miles of solar panels would supply 80% of ALL of the USA power needs? Build it bigger, and make the super conducter version of the Alaskan pipeline and sell it to Canada and Mexico..
..........FULL STOP.
If you can build and operate 10 100MW solar plants, you're taking up more than an order of magnitude more land area than a nuclear plant, as well as having significant geographic restrictions on locations of the plants.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Very well indeed. After all, you can't use the land around the nuke power plant for anything useful, but you CAN use the land between solar panels quite well, and if this land use paid for the land before, you don't have to pay for the land now with SPV.
That most of the French plants were built by the military in an effort to become a nuclear power is, for the most part wrong. A few of the earlier plants were graphite moderated, gas cooled, which were presumably used for Pu production. There was a push in the bureaucracy for more of these to be built for electricity, put the engineers in the power producing group preferred light water reactors, which are much less useful for Pu production. When there was a push to get off of oil fired electric generation, almost all of the plants were light water. Given the British experience with graphite moderated power plants, the French evidently made the right decision.
Call me a pessimist, but mirrors and motors are already 'fully developed' in non-solar applications. It's like electric cars. Hardly anything in an EV is unique to EVs, so we are able to come up with good cost estimates. Sure, the prototypes and initial runs will be more expensive, but that's true of any vehicle.
Automation would be good, it's just the question becomes one of 'can it be 3X-5X as good?'.
I don't read AC A human right
Meanwhile, in the little town where I lived in Southern Oregon a few years ago, a Natural Gas 500MW power plant cost something like $80-100 million to build.
It's true. Fossil fuel plants are far cheaper to build, but their fuel usage costs a lot more.
You are forgetting that every part of a solar thermal plant can be mass produced from relatively inexpensive basic materials.
No, I'm not. Matter of fact, my assessment DEPENDS on them using 'relatively inexpensive basic materials'. IE the reason I don't think costs will drop enough to make it economic is that you're not looking at insanely expensive special components becoming far cheaper. You're already looking at developed components that are almost as economic as they can get.
Which specific components do you propose becoming an order of magnitude cheaper?
Off the top of my head:
Mirrors, motors, supports.
Salt, Solar concentrator, piping, pumps, and turbine. Steam system. Salt reservoir.
Fairly standard industrial computer control system, customized for solar application.
Areas for good drop in price - the control system, possibly the concentrator. The steam system/turbine might be optimizable, but I don't see it dropping an order of magnitude. The Salt might get a bit cheaper if we start installing enough solar for a dedicated supply industry to form and specialize/automate.
Once mass production parts become available, it is pretty much reduced to contractors leveling the site and placement of equipment.
There's engineering costs to 'leveling' a site, and I'm not sure we want to 'level' sites the size of solar farms all over the place. There's drainage, erosion, and other issues invovled when you do stuff like that.
Not having one-off solar plants will help a LOT with engineering costs, but they're only one leg of three.
I don't read AC A human right
I've worked for electric utilities for 30 years. Utilities don't care if they get electricity from nuclear, solar, coal, water, or little elves as long as it's cheap. They are not in the nuclear business, they are in the cheap electricity business. If solar power was more economical, utilities would shutdown the nukes and coal plants in a heartbeat. But they are not. They are building more nukes. Why? ONLY because it's cheaper than other available alternatives. The article is rubbish. That's all there is to say about that.
http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/07/27/2019244/Possible-Room-Temperature-Superconductor-Achieved
-- Smug Asshole
The components that will benefit the most from mass production are the heliostats and parabolic trough assemblies. They are not currently mass produced. Each site requires thousands or more of identical units.
With sufficiently high demand, they could be assembled by the millions in mostly automated factories in the say way that automobiles are.
They do this at the Defense Waste Processing Facility at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The process was begun about 15 years ago and will continue for a while. But it happens in phases and it's not like glass logs have just been rolling off the assembly line and straight into Nevada. The stuff they have processed is good to be stored at SRS for a while.
The second half of my dad's career was concerned with DWPF and I toured the facility before it went hot, so I know it's happening. It's definitely not a zippity-doo-dah kinda thing and it's easy to imagine the whole situation being hung out to dry by one major upheaval or another (act of god or government).
Nuclear energy is the only viable alternative and can be produced much cheaper. Solar can't even begin to power the needs of a nation, regardless of cost.
Oh, you know what, I just wanna make clear that DWPF is defense waste processing. It's not from like civil nuclear plants or anything. So I might agree that there's not much good stuff being done with civil nuke waste in this country.
How much space does a 300MW solar plant take up? now how much room does one need for a 300MW nuclear plant? how much power could be produced in the same area as the 300MW solar plant if it was filled with nuclear power plants?
There really shouldn't be much waste from a nuclear plant, but the US has a ban on re-breeding. The modern reactor designs also have much less waste than our dumb 1950's and 1970's designs. Also the cost of insurance for a Nuke is way out of proportion with the actual dangers.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
Are you able to get a contract from your local utility to carve in stone that kilowatt hour price for ten, twenty or thirty years, get it locked in? If so, cool, if not, your figures are an apples and oranges comparison because you have no idea what your centralized grid supplied power will cost in the future. My guess would be..always go up.
Also, prices on panels..there is a theoretical way to get cheaper panels, do a mass bulk group buy and get wholesale instead of retail prices. Once you can deal with the real panel manufacturer instead of some middle man retail, well, it's just loads cheaper. Buy a few at a time, expensive, get a container load..cheaper.
Then there is also the benefit of having on site power that is clean and acts as a whole house UPS system. You get *good* power out of these systems, very clean, better than most grid supplied. This is worth something, along with I have noticed that grid supplied always seems to go out at the most inopportune time, right when you need it the most, cold ice storms (whoops! furnace stops working), heat waves (whoops, no AC or fans available, food melting away in freezer, etc), etc. Hard to put an actual cost figure on that, but it *is* useful to have your power supply better secured.
Been there done that, went through a near week long grid outage, but because the place was mostly PV and batts (all circuits but the ancient outside heatpump), suffered not one second downtime (january ice and windstorm). In fact, I didn't even know the grid was down until the evening, when I noticed all the street lights down in the valley weren't on. A few hours grid downtime ain't bad, but days can start to get really sucky. Doesn't happen all the time, but it does happen across the nation to large segments of the people now and then.
Home produced you are paying a premium partially as it has a more "electricity insurance" benefit than grid supplied. That's worth something, but it is a variable situation to situation.
Another thing about solar PV is that it isn't an either/or situation, you don't have to replace all your needs, you can go one circuit at a time. Example, like noted above, it might be nice if your furnace circuit could stay up, to burn that natgas in your furnace in the winter, or to keep a window fan going in a heat wave, or to power your home office and all your expensive gear (we are geeks, we all appreciate a good UPS system, the benefits there). You can add on more PV powered circuits at your leisure, just start out with a large enough subpanel so you have upgrade room.
So, like today, get one or two circuits, your most critical done, even if it is more expensive. Five ~ ten years down the road, your loot has gone to help fund more R and D and production, now the stuff is cheaper still, and better quality, more efficient. If everyone did this, eventually, it would be really slick, real cost competitive and quite functional. Look at the relatively short time frame when computers were still rare in the home and very expensive, to today, say the last 15 years. Thousands of bucks back then, for slow speed, limited ram and storage, etc, to today a few hundred bucks for systems much better overall. That's what economies of scale can do, once the ball really gets rolling and mass adoption and competition kicks in better.
Looking at the methodology, I notice that they do not take into account operational lifetime and repair/replacement costs.
Solar panels will lose generating capacity over their life time. Most panels will lose about 85% of their generating capacity within 30 years. Because of this, if the goal is to generate a minimum of 10 MW of electricity over 30 years, one must start with almost 12 MW of generating capacity. The other option would be to continually add panels to make up the short fall, which adds cost. This does not include maintenance and repair costs. How much damage would be done by a hail storm, tornado, hurricane, or just a very strong wind storm?
Nuclear power plants are designed with a lifespan of 30-40 years, during which they will not lose any generating capacity. Almost every part of nuclear plant can be replaced except the actual reactor vessel. Because of this, nuclear plants have a much longer life span than designed. They are issued licenses for 10 years of operation and every 10 years must be re-evaluated by a safety commission to get a new license. The plants themselves are designed to withstand extreme weather and physical attack. The generation plants can be upgraded to new and better generators and more efficient turbines as they are developed.
To me, it seems that this study only addresses initial cost. It does not seem to address total cost of ownership over the lifetime of the plant/farm.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
As oil gets more expensive (either due to decreasing amounts of it, or environmental pressure in many forms) we will start using less of it. Once on the energy habit, people will not want to quit. People want cheap transportation. Oil gave us that. Horses didn't give us that. Wind didn't give us that. Oil gave us that. Oil in the form of gasoline or diesel is a huge, portable amount of energy. About 100 years ago, people found out very quickly that a 5 gallon can of gasoline has more energy than 1.5 chords of wood. Last time I checked, where I live, the insolation energy (energy available from the sun) was about 56 watts per square meter (latitude 53.5 degrees). With solar panels at about 16% efficient, a 1 square meter panel gives me 8.96 watts of power (sunny day, summer solstace, no clouds). My car has an engine which produces 175 horsepower. 175 horsepower (at 746 watts per horsepower) is 130550 watts, or 130.055 kilowatts. If I were to power my car for one hour from a 1 square meter solar panel, I would have to charge the car (assuming there is no loss in storage or distribution) for 14570 hours which is just slightly over 607 days.....to drive my current car for one hour. Clearly, solar power isn't enough to replace oil. Nevertheless, I expect I will be using solar energy more significantly in the future. New panel makers are claiming their very best products can (at least in a lab) get to 40.5% efficiency. Show me a panel I can buy at that efficency and I will plaster the roof of my house with it (them). Wind is also a great source of energy, although I would only put a 2 meter (6 foot) diameter blade over my roof. Geothermal is a great source of heat, and if you go deep enough, you can use it to boil water/turbine/electrical generator. Nuclear must, *MUST* be used to fill in the gaps when oil is gone. *MUST*
Some systems use pumped storage; you have a low reservoir and a high one. When you have extra incoming energy, you use it to pump water upwards; when you need to get the energy back, you let it run a turbine. There's transaction costs in the pump's inefficiencies, leakage, evaporation and so forth, but it's a pretty simple system and should be attachable to most any intermittent power source.
Also, that's Neal Stephenson, not Neil Gaiman.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Texas stays pretty hot even in winter, and the new solar designs apparently can produce electricity even after dark (for a while, they kind of 'charge up during the day').
This is based on stuff I read over a year ago, so there may be some lapses, but:
The plant being built in the Mohave uses mirrors to heat a tank of working fluid. (I forget what. I think they decided against liquid sodium.) It keeps working as long as the tank is hot enough. I forget how long it is expected to stay warm enough under load. (I keep thinking a week, but I think I'm confusing it with another plant.)
For this plant, think of solar as just another way of heating a boiler for a closed cycle steam engine. (it's a bit more indirect than that, but I think that's the basic design they settled on.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I just like the idea of renewable better. I would rather just live without the electricity if I can't get it from these sources. I don't use ac now in my car or at home. I just get along without it. My office has ac though. I would rather pay more for renewable energy, regardless of cost.
The REAL cost of nuclear power, as opposed to the artificially inflated costs you see spouted, are less than a penny per MWatt - unfortunately, as you layer on more and more book-keeping costs and define by definition all waste as hazardous those costs go up tremendously. You could say mouse-powered cars where cheaper if you artificially inflated the costs of everything else. So these types of comparison are little more than unmitigated horsesh*t...
A true cost of nuclear power would be much much less, and a lot safer than any of the alternatives... Unfortunately, you'll never hear that due to the boogeyman that nuclear power has been made into.
That's an amazingly bad article for the New York Times. It's based on a single paper which reads like a sales brochure. The figures for power costs are after subsides. Solar power isn't charged with storage costs. (Although, in hot areas, the solar peak coincides with the air conditioning peak. Wind has much worse problems; output is totally unrelated to when power is needed.)
Their projections are even worse. Their projection graph has data points in the future, which they then fit with a line. What? The SolarBuzz solar power price index, which is from a solar advocacy group, is far higher than the numbers in that paper. SolarBuzz shows a decline from $0.22/KWh in 2000 to $0.19/Kwh in 2010 today for medium-industrial sized roof-top solar projects in US sunbelt states, including inverters and grid connection, but not land or power storage. That's only a 10% decline per decade, not the 40% decline shown in the paper.
Nobody has actually built and started up a big nuclear plant in the US in several decades, so there's no real cost basis available there. China has 22 reactors under construction right now.
The engineering costs are paid for, but there are these nasty monopolies for 20 years which will drain every tiniest little bit of profit up to what to the market will bear ... aka patents.
Solar is great. I personally love it. Yet, it still can not be considered for base load power (i.e. the power needed to keep the grid from collapsing since solar is dependent on how sunny it is (or in many cases, isn't), and the time of day/night cycle for how much power it can still provide). That still doesn't help the grid at 5 or 6am when a lot of buildings turn on the AC/heat in preparation for occupancy by the daily workers...
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
...pumped storage
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The components that will benefit the most from mass production are the heliostats and parabolic trough assemblies. They are not currently mass produced. Each site requires thousands or more of identical units.
But their design is known, ergo it's simply an engineering problem to figure out approximately how much automation is possible, how much said automation would cost, and what production levels would be necessary to justify said automation. Take it backwards, when X is at 'Thousands' of production per year, Y automation is justified, resulting in Z cost. Increase X to 'Millions', 10Y automation is justified, resuling in z/5 cost. Or maybe it's z/2, I don't know, you end up with a lot of variables.
Solar thermal also faces some other problems - they have huge footprints for the power, need to be placed in the highest sun areas, making putting them away from people best, but you still need to run powerlines to them, which can add millions.
Given the level of subsidization green energy gets, including solar, I'd be working hard to automate/build a collector factory because if I can undersell everyone else I stand to make boatloads of money.
I don't read AC A human right
I'm a raving pro-nuke, but even the biggest solar detractor should be willing to admit this. In the few places in the States with the highest "insolation" (national champion: Death Valley, about 8 kWh/m2/day) you could build some very effective solar plants that would be perfect for handling the sunshine-related air-conditioning power spikes that plague that same region. And it wouldn't be that hard to push the power as far as California and through the western half of the US "Sun Belt" that has skyrocketed in population.
I see nuclear as the best choice for "base load" power, but not all power is base load, and for the air-conditioning related spikes, solar is actually a pretty natural, even obvious, option. It's not even 10% of the national consumption, but would eliminate the guilt people are feeling now when they gratefully turn on that blessedly cool air.
Nuclear power is good when:
-need to store large amounts of energy for winter/space trip/subparine
-make nuclear weapons research/technology a little more economical
-you sit on a lot of uranium
-you are wiling to waste a piece of land for the nuclear waste
asides from that, it's a fail....
That's because Germany has long have had an anti-nuclear stance, while actively promoting solar energy. Even they are reconsidering on keeping nuclear plants open for a longer time, in the wake of economic realities.
I think that 'actively promoting it' is understating the issue.
Germany Slashes Solar Subsidies, Threatening Industry (Update2)
Homes and businesses earn a government-guaranteed price of as much as 47 euro cents ($0.74) for each kilowatt-hour of solar power they generate,
The country has trimmed subsidized prices by 5 percent a year from about 1 euro per kilowatt-hour nine years ago to spur the industry to control expenses and improve efficiency.
I think it was Italy that they found a 'solar' site running generators at night to earn more money...
I don't read AC A human right
I personally would love a citation on this, but only because I think it's an important point that needs to be backed up with evidence.
get out of the way Feds!
does anyone believe the babbling old gray lady in the corner any more?
Anonymous Coward, because it doesn't mean enough to me to mean anything to you
You're still having this argument?
Free Martian Whores!
so one square kilometer of earth surface
gets heated by the sun. now there are two cases:
a) you build a nuke plant that generates heat by fission. you get "heat from sun" + "heat from fission"
b) you build a solar-plant. it TAKES the heat (photons from the sun) and makes electricity. you get "heat from sun" - "energy as electricity"
so in case a) the square kilometer of earth gets hotter, while in case b) the square kilometer of earth gets .. colder? ...
-
goto "www.heatmybed.com". they are selling socks stuffed with depleted nuke-material you can wear in those long, cold winter nights
So you don't believe it's possible to improve on "mirrors and motors"?
You are welcome on my lawn.
The problem with nukes is that people have this tendendacy to
make mistakes. Make a mistake with with a windmill or solar
and you might hurt yourself and a co-worker or two. Make a
mistake with a nuke and the entire world suffers. After
Chernobyl there was radioactive fallout in the continental
United States. Go look at a map and see how far away the US
is from Chernobyl. And the problem doesn't go away in a few
days, either. Germany still has problems from Chernobyl,
over 24 years later:
http://www.thelocal.de/national/20100729-28819.html
Have we learned anything in the last 24 years? BP's
problems repairing a simple plumbing leak say no.
It sounds like you're making the mistake of believing the level of technology we have today is the limit to human innovation.
The problem I have with that kind of thinking is that it's been proved wrong consistently through history.
The "molten salt" approach we're talking about is almost certainly just a step in a long curve of technological advance. You build one and the next guy finds a better, cheaper way. Then someone else comes along with something more effective than salt.
I'm not saying you're guilty of this, but I hear constantly from certain people the notion that we shouldn't consider solar energy because the technology for solar energy is somehow insufficient, assuming that unlike every area of human endeavor, there won't be further advances.
You are welcome on my lawn.
"Now considering that one nuclear power station usually generates 1 to 5 GIGAwatts, and these generate in the order of TENS OF MEGAwatts, it is inconceivable to me how anyone can compare Solar to Nuclear."
Which is precisely why no nuclear power plants are being built in the US. Utilities don't need large amounts of new power all at once. They need smaller amounts over time. Solar and wind are great at supplying this incremental demand.
The utilities learned the hard way about the unreliability of future power generation predications. This led to the building off and default off many nuclear power plants in the past. If they actually need large amounts of power generating capacity they will build coal or natural gas plants because they take less time and are more economical.
Piling up barrels haphazardly into an area where ground water flows in and out is monumentally stupid.
The Yucca mountain facility is not a waste containment center, it's a radiation containment facility that holds the items through their decomposition period.
While I believe it to be a monumentally expensive endeavor and positively way too "modern marvel"''ish, I figured I'd clear that up since the whole water running thing came into play.
Carry on.
Our power distribution is entirely based on increasing PRODUCTION to meet demand, not STORING energy to offset future demand spikes
Our power distribution currently is a power distribution system alone and has nothing to do with how the energy is made. It's a delivery system, alone.
You could have a single monolithic battery with all the energy in the galaxy within it, all plugged into the distribution system and it'd to the same thing... distribute.
Dead bodies being thrown into a furnace to power a turbine would be just as effective, but you don't see people piling up with that... take nuclear and replace it with any other object that makes water hot to spin a turbine and you have the same damned thing. Ecologically the creation method is healthier, but solar is never to be discounted since it's inevitably ecologically free energy.
In other words, don't be a douche.
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
I fail to see how that in any way invalidates what I said.
Until the sun sets, which is when a lot of demand happens, and suddenly solar isn't producing any more. This is fine for coal/natural gas/nuclear plants and even (in most cases) hydroelectric plants, as we just turn the dial up on them and get more electricity out of them. We can't do that with solar or wind power, as we don't have any control over how much they produce at any given time. Hence my comment about storage--depending on solar/wind will require massive investment in energy storage and require a major reworking of how we handle demand on the network. So, yes, it does matter where the power comes from.
Also, unless I missed some really amazing developments, solar does require materials with which to actually build the panels, some of which are not nice. Saying it's ecologically free isn't quite the truth. Better? Sure, but poisons and fossil fuels are still used in their production.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
so? it's much easier to survive tropical storms at sea... just build them on rafts, you know? When a hurricane comes, large ships leave the harbor.
It sounds like you're making the mistake of believing the level of technology we have today is the limit to human innovation.
I do somewhat believe this, in that I believe that we've found most of the 'easy answers'. Basically, in order for solar to become economically cheaper, molten salt is unlikely to be the answer. I'm not saying the answer isn't out there, but that the current solution isn't likely to evolve into a practical one without a couple of other breakthrough technologies. What form those could take I won't say - cheaper mirrors, cheaper control systems, auto-morphing(cheap) mirrors, robotic construction, heck even just automated construction of 'smart' sub-assemblies so you can practically just toss them off a truck and they'll line themselves up.
I'm not saying you're guilty of this, but I hear constantly from certain people the notion that we shouldn't consider solar energy because the technology for solar energy is somehow insufficient, assuming that unlike every area of human endeavor, there won't be further advances.
I judge each project on it's own merits; my reservations for this solar system was confined to THIS style of implimentation. If they can make project #5 for 1/3rd the cost of this one, great, install them all over. From the descriptions though I don't see avenues for savings that great.
I don't read AC A human right
"... $600 Billion of Taxpayer money..."
That is for loan guarantees, not spending. A story from today: U.S. Nuclear Projects Tied Up Awaiting Federal Loan Guarantees.
Detailed explanation of loan guarantees.
Quote: "Loan guarantees can be made to a wide variety of innovative energy technologies and projects, not just nuclear energy."
Sure, it's possible to improve on them. That's why I put 'fully developed' in quotes. But they're both still mature technologies in other industries.
By 'fully developed' I mean more that you're looking at price drops below inflation, say, 1%, not higher than 10% like what you'd more expect from a developing technology.
I don't read AC A human right
Two points.
First, with very big industrial operations the cost of wages, pensions, whatever is a truly tiny fraction of the total costs so the bleating about unions in such an environment is misleading emotive bullshit usually dragged up to push some agenda. Consider mining operations as an example and how places that pay huge wages (driven by scarcity not unions) outcompete Bolivian mines that pay tiny wages and make their workers buy their own tools and explosives.
Second, that wonderful figure from France represents maximum possible capacity and not daily reality or even reality at the best possible time. They are doing quite well with an economy of scale but not as well as that number indicates and other portions of the electricity industry do subsidise the nuclear plants. Losses such as those with experimental plants come out of general taxation and not the 6 cents per kWh. It's also uncertain how much or any of that goes into repaying the capital costs to build the production plants.
Ah yes, yet another that is pretending that it would have worked except for those hippie kids and their damn dog.
It was a technical dead end that looked good on paper in 1968 but bad enough in reality to give up on by 2007. Nothing more to it than that, and now things are being developed in a different direction.
But solar energy is nuclear energy.
Liberty.
If all the people who live in sunny places around the world turned to solar it would reduce demand for oil and reduce your costs in less sunny places.
Does this study include the cost of the surface area (land) needed to put up a solar plant of industrial sizing?
Maybe NC has enough free space, but there are regions on this globe that are in high demand of energy, but where there simply is not enough space (at affordable price) to build such a power plant.
120 chars is not enough!
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf02.html and http://www.solarbuzz.com/StatsCosts.htm and the crucial test, this article fails on my personal, does it sound like bull meter.
Historically, nuclear was heavily subsidised. Without those subsidies, it was far more expensive.
Mod parent up.
As +5 Funny, not +5 Interesting. Seems like slashdot editors can't understand sarcasm if it hits them in the face.
(and then go and mod up the explanation as +5 Funny??)
Once electricity is cheap you can start replacing many devices, which use gas, to use electricity instead. One example is a cooking stove. If you have plentiful cheap electric power you are better off installing an induction cooker, or a microwave. This increases electricity consumption per capita further.
Also, the nuclear power plants the French use are more sophisticated than a lot of people give them credit for. You often hear people call nuclear power plants "baseload" i.e. you cannot turn the reactor off, or reduce the power generation, without taking a long time to spool up/spool down the reactor. Presumably this would mean a lot of nighttime nuclear electricity would go wasted. The truth matter is that you can power down a nuclear power plant during the night. The French do this.
Most French nuclear power plants can use load following. They have special control rods which enable then to run their reactor between 30% and 100% of reactor capacity with a slope of 5% of rate power per minute. However the French nuclear power plants run at 77% capacity factor. The French do not "need" to export the power. It is just that this way they can run their nuclear power plants for a longer time and maximize return on investment.
The Germans, in contrast, have a tax on nuclear power plants while simultaneously having generation subsidies on wind and solar power. They also used to forbid the construction of new nuclear power plants last time I heard about it. The result is they have to buy more natural gas from Russia to cover power generation shortfalls from these highly variable wind and solar resources, and use burn coal, or import nuclear electricity from France for a lot of their usual needs.
you mean the rafts.... surrounded by thousands of other rafts... which need power cables between the and to the shore?
An electricity generator must sell their electricity to the market. A power plant may decide to sell forward 10 years of electricity in order to finance it's capital. It is then required to produce exactly the amount which it sold on each day. If it fails to produce this amount, the ISO will issue it large fines. Traditional PV solar is very unpredictable, as the sun can go behind a cloud and cut the power generated in half. This means it's very difficult to sell a contract to deliver a fixed amount of electricity. As such, large installations of solar PV have been rare in the US. However, most states have laws allowing for 'net metering'. This allows homes and small business to send small amounts of electricity back to the grid, without having to sell it to a power company in advance. In the US, coal and hydro cost less than $0.05/KWH. While I expect solar to continue to get less expensive, it's still by far the most costly way to generate electricity.
I'm not afraid of being called Anonymous Cow just because of the fact I don't have time to register for and maintain accounts on every website on the planet... Tie in with Facebook or something else I already have and we'll talk, Slashdot.
Anyhow... Wake up people! All forms of energy on Earth ARE solar energy, and we're bathed in the stuff half the time. We can squeeze out what we need from the pure stuff, not to mention wind, geothermal etc. Is this reporting coming from proponents of the solar industry? And glowing (pardon the pun) reports about nuclear aren't from industry shills? Please! At least people getting into solar are more likely to start from a foundation of actual concern for the planet, otherwise it would be easier for them to work their way up in the more established, but highly icky and in need of falling by the wayside, oil, gas, coal or nuke industries. Meanwhile, think about the Gulf and Michigan Oil Spills. Then think about the fact that a few years ago the nuclear industry, and the U.S. government, were ready to bury nuclear waste on an earthquake fault at Yucca Mountain. Corporations, and the people running them, are too irresponsible to be allowed to play with toys that can have such impact on so much of nature, and human lives in particular.
"Yes, I agree, we're being idiots. So let's stop being stupid and SAVE HUMAN CIVILIZATION! The tech already exists, we did it in the past*--all that's stopping us is stupid policy decisions, not any technical hurdles."
Fine, first show me that accomplished (active, long-term storage solution) and then we can have a discussion about opening new nuclear plants.
* [Citation needed.] To my understanding, no long-term repositories for nuclear waste have actually been used anywhere in the world.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
No, don't move the goalposts. What I specifically said was that the waste problem was made up. What we're calling "waste" is, for the most part, very useful material that can be further used for power generation in addition to numerous medical and scientific applications. Burying it in the ground is exactly the WRONG thing to do with it. In the past we HAVE successfully reprocessed spent fuel and extracted the useful bits out of it. The reason people are scared of the process is we didn't call it "reprocessing" so much as "making atomic bombs," but it doesn't have to be used for that.
Once we've extracted the useful bits (which make up the vast majority of the "waste" mass), then we can talk about storage.
Oh wait, except that we don't have to. The left-over low level crap can be further used in things like pebble-bed reactor designs, so we've reduced our "waste" footprint even further.
The final remaining miniscule amount can be glassified and stored in some dry tomb somewhere.
And saying "No one has actually done this before!" is a lousy argument for not doing something--if it's your only argument.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
Exactly. The plants are cheap. The fuel? Not so much. And we have no idea how costly that fuel could become in the future. Maybe it'll get cheaper. Maybe costs will go thru the roof.
With solar the risks are somewhat lower. We have a good idea how the panels degrade over time, and we know the sun's not going anywhere (if it does, we'll have bigger problems than power generation).
Maybe not all of us want to see every square inch of desert covered in solar panels. Compare the surface area used to generate 1Gigawatt at a Nuke vs Solar
Have you seen how much landscape can be ripped apart by mountaintop removal coal mining, or open pit uranium mines?
Beyond that, hundreds of millions of people already live in areas that receive plenty of sun to make PV solar practical. Instead of carpeting distant deserts with solar panels, simply place the panels atop the existing rooftops of the homes, shops, factories and offices where these people live and work. While the panels might not be quite as efficient as they would be out in the open desert, you eliminate transmission losses by generating the power where it's mostly or entirely consumed.
Of course large corporations don't like this, since they'd lose the ability to control the supply of power as effectively.
thanks man. I've been into alt energy since the late 60s. I am finally getting some satisfaction that after all these years it is starting to crack through some skulls that this is the long term really good solution and the quicker we adopt it en masse and get it going so it can go through faster evolutionary cycles, the better.
Solar is just fantastic, it is working here and now fusion tech,the only one we have. It just ain't gonna get better than that anytime soon. I also like it because it is safe, and no wars over it, and it can't be monopolized, and joe homeowner can actually own the means of production and get one serious bill *paid the heck off*.
Didn't notice it missing before I hit submit:
average of 13 people die per day in coal pits
Coal power in china is a dirty, nasty affair. Hope they do better with nuclear(and thus far they are).
I don't read AC A human right
I put your 1100 tons on the end of the URL by mistake.
I carry a tritium keyring that has a half life and lights up my pocket with it's radioactive decay.
Are you doing this so that if you misplaced your keychain, you can use a Geiger counter to find it?
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the 'social sciences' is: some do, some don't
In other words, the NY Times author based its assertion on a commissioned paper from an organization on a mission. The author neglected to read the paper's appendix where the authors explained that a residential solar system producing a peak power output of 3 kwe would cost $18,000 installed and provide electricity at 35 cents per kilowatt hour if financed at 6% over a 25 year period.
If the homeowner accepted the current 30% federal tax credit and the 35% state tax credit, the resulting system would only cost the homeowner $8,190 and would cost taxpayers $9,810. With the same financing scheme, the homeowner could produce electricity for 15.9 cents NET cost to him. Unfortunately, the average retail price of electricity in North Carolina is just 10.9 cents per kilowatt hour delivered all day and all night.
This is a completely deceptive use of numbers to capture eyeballs. It is way below what used to pass for journalistic standards at the Times. Rod Adams Publisher, Atomic Insights (Note - I published a more detailed deconstruction on my blog. I think Mugs linked to it earlier in this thread.)
"And by the way, in Germany on sunny days there is more electricity produced by photovoltaics than by nuclear reactors."
Peak output doesn't matter, but even so it is a patent lie. The entire installed capacity of photovoltaics in Germany is ~10 GW, which is less than the ~17 GWe average output of Germany's nuclear fleet. Even in ideal wheather you're not going to reach ~10 GW for various reasons(e.g. the thickness of atmosphere the sun has to pass through at that lattitude, dirt and crud on the panels, partial shading etc.).
What's even more impressive is that this is a country that has been trying to phase out nuclear energy and trying to hamstring it at every turn and at the same time raping the tax payer to give a 50 euro-cents per kWh feed-in-tarriffs to photovoltaics.
If you look at the actual output of the photovoltaics, with a yearly capacity factor of ~10% in Germany or about the same as Alaska, the entire installed capacity of photovoltaics produces as much energy over a year as a single nuclear reactor or large coal plant. It's also an inferior quality of energy; you don't get nearly as much of it in the winter when you really need it and forcasting the output in advance is error prone; you've always got to have some dirt-burners, typically burning russian natural gas, ramping up and down in tune with the wind and sun, this is a very inefficient activity and wastes significant amounts of natural gas.
$1 billion for 550 MW of installed solar is a bum deal. At a typical capacity factor of 20% for non-tracking solar in a desert environment it is that's $9/W of average power. It alsost certainly is an overnight cost, not including the cost of financing which would almost double that. It probably doesn't include the power lines either; in the case of solar those tend to come at the expense of the tax payer.
And that's not accounting for the poorer quality of the power produced. In order to produce baseload power from solar you would have to combine it with a large amount of peaking power(reservoired hydro or natural gas, the scarcest of fossil fuels and only slightly cleaner than coal).
Because ten 100MW solar plants do not equal one 1000MW nuke plant.
In order to get the average output of 1000MW, you need fifty 100MW solar plants (100MW * 20% capacity factor).
Solar plants are deceptively refered to by their peak output even though their average output is only about a fifth of that.
Who do you think builds and operates big solar plants? That's right "enormous energy conglomerates."
well, there's the author's ignorant bias showing.
there has never been a 50% default rate.
there was one gao study that did a worst-case what if extrapolation using a hypothetical 50% default rate.
even for a fossil fuel apologist, this was a sloppy article.
(http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/27/business/global/27iht-renuke.html)
Perhaps it is time for a similar note on the Slashdot post. Rod Adams Publisher, Atomic Insights