Slashdot Mirror
Swiss To End Use of Nuclear Power
mdsolar writes "Energy minister Doris Leuthard is set to propose Switzerland gradually exits nuclear power, two Swiss newspapers reported on Sunday, citing sources close to the government. The multi-party Swiss government was expected to make an announcement on nuclear policy on Wednesday and may recommend an exit. Switzerland's five nuclear reactors generate about 40 percent of the country's electricity."
Avalanche power?
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
The Slashdot headline is (predictably?) not accurate. The Swiss *ARE NOT* ending nuclear power. Rather, there is a proposal to gradually exit nuclear power by not building any new plants. Realistically, even if such a proposal was approved by the current government, given the growing energy needs of society and the shrinking supply / rising cost / environmental issues associated with fossil fuels, I don't see this happening. The current technologies of renewable energy simply cannot support the world's energy needs.
So what's it going to be? Continue with fossil fuels, or continue developing safer cleaner nuclear? Switzerland's five nuclear reactors generate about 40 percent of the country's electricity, and the needs will only grow. What can realistically replace that?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
So an anti-nuclear story posted by a user named 'mdsolar' with a blog running very anti-nuclear posts. He also is involved in a business that rents solar systems to homes (http://www.blogger.com/profile/14124764472206647347).
Christ, Slashdot. Can you be a bit more opaque in posting biased stories?
No, but I do hear that they have ogres.
Why, an intricate and precise clock-work driven by a wind-up spring.
The big thing with energy is the externalization of costs to the general public, both real and opportunity. It is not really a conservative of liberal thing. When the BP oil well exploded in the Gulf or Mexico, conservatives all along the conservative Gulf Coast raised hell about the externalization of costs. Conservative Florida threw a fit even though conservative support approving drilling in the Gulf with minimal regulations. The coal industry is allowed to destroy public owned resources the could be better monetized by future generation with no recompense to future generations. And the nuclear industry is allowed to irradiate resources and create waste without a management plan. The Swiss reprocesses and stores the larger quantity, but less radioactive waste. Whether this faustian bargain will be acceptable in the long term is yet to be seen. What is true is that unlike out previous energy experiments in the industrial revolution will not be so easy to reverse. The benefit of nuclear energy is that most of the externalization is limited to the nation-state that benefits from the energy, unlike other sources in which the externalization is wolrd wide.
On a total cost basis other energy sources are viable. Switzerland has good solar irradiation potential. It also has mountains. During the day excess solar energy can be used to pump water up the mountain into a reservoir, and then run through a hydroelectric generator when needed. The same is true for wind. All without externalazing costs to future generations.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
The problem is wind can't ensure baseload power. You can say "it never stops blowing" - but how low does it dip? Because that's the minimum you have to assume *will* happen. Which means you have to make up the loss with something else. It's practical for generators with a short startup time like coal and gas, but if you want to go no carbon then you pretty much can't even bother with wind at the moment. There's no practical, grid-scale load-levelling technology.
Those are few and far between, even today. The Soviet Union lied to their own people about Cherynobyl. The Japanese government withheld messy truth until they were outed by foreign press.
I believe nukes can be safe, but most governments are not trustworthy enough to make that happen.
Sorry, pal - but it is "lack of sunlight" which makes winter, well, Winter. Thus, longer winter = less potential energy to create/convert. Ipso facto, and all that...
Do you have any direct experience with solar? I do. I run my boat off of it. I live at a rather balmy 35N latitude, and even here my solar panels electric producing ability take a big hit when the daylight hours shorten by a large factor (in the winter), *and* the sun is at a more oblique angle in the sky, making it's rays weaker (also, in the winter).
I also wonder if you have ever really spent time any length of time in mountains. They affect airflow, and thus weather, and even create their own clouds. Not all the time, but by and large it is a whole lot cloudier in mountains than in flat areas, like the desert (whether low or high altitude). All in all, I think solar as the energy of choice for a high-latitude, mountainous country is far from the best choice for energy production.
"...there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight. Awkwardness and stupidity can." ~ Mark Twain
So that is why the Dutch powered their golden age mainly with wind power. Wind + mountains = buffer. Just pump up water and attach the hydro generators to your precious grid. Gee, I wonder how mankind has ever accomplished anything before there even was a grid.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Mankind didn't have to support billions of lives at that point.
We absolutely need power to drive the world as we know it - if we decide to abolish nuclear power we also need to go back to old way of life which means a couple of billion of lives will need to be sacrificed.
Bundesrätin Doris Leuthard has no power above and beyond her six colleagues to make this decision, as you might expect this will be a very carefully considered decision and is unlikey to hold, unless other credible energy sources are found. Shale gas is unlikely due tho the Geology.
Hydroelectric, geothermal and new nuclear (Thorium) are in the mix.
The Swiss, unlike the Germans are not known for emotionalism, lack of planning or economic suicide.
The unofficial national motto is "Do it right the first time".
It's a very very valid point about solar 45 degrees+ from the equator.
Trying to run anything serious off batteries, flywheels or even pumped storage is barely sane overnight in places on the equator.
Trying to do the same during winter far from the equator is even less sane.
-Hydro is lovely but very limited unless you're in Brazil, the best sources are already being tapped already and it screws with the river ecosystem and makes vast tracts of land unusable.
-Wind is nice but is very unreliable, 20% of your grid is somewhat of an upper limit if you want to keep the grid any way stable.
-Solar is still a toy unless you talk to a solar panel salesman.
-Geothermal is glorious if you happen to be in iceland.
-Tidal is sorta ok until you get serious and then the greens hate it because it totally destroys coastal ecosystems.
And then there's fossil fuels which are terrible on almost every front.
finally there's nuclear which simply kills less people than getting your electricity from fossil fuels but the way it kills people- cancer happens to be how 25% of everyone dies anyway so if an accident happens which raises that to 25.001% then you get the blame for the other 25.000% and everyone will always have lots of people they knew who died of cancer and in their minds every single one of those deaths will be the fault of nuclear.
There is a lot going on about nuclear plants in Germany. Maybe I missed it, but I did not read anything about it on Slashdot.
Germany plans to completely phase out off nuclear power over the next 11 years, and to massively build up renewable energy power plants.
Germany has 17 nuclear reactors, producing about 20% of total produced power. The seven oldest reactors were shut down after the Fukushima incident. Out of the remaining 10 reactors, 6 are currently shut down for scheduled mainenance, leaving only 4 nuclear reactors running.
Normally Germany is mostly exporting power. During the last 2 months the power import/export was about balanced, with 7-8 reactors running.
Italy turned off the last nuclear power plant in 1990. The Swiss are really not the only ones doing this. On a sidenote, Italy now imports lots of power from France, mostly through the nights. It is not that Italy could not produce enough power on its own, it is just that France nearly gives away the power through the night because of their high number of nuclear reactors that just keep running.
Related to this, Desertec should also be mentioned. This is a renewable energy project targeted at providing 15% of Europe's power. A lot of it should come from solar power plants in northern Africa.
I believe that if we had a more accurate picture of the consequences of trying to move to expensive energy-diffuse sources (wind, solar, geothermal, tidal, biofuels, etc), that we'd be thinking twice about our aversion to nuclear fission. The Green Party (of which I am a member) imagines a renewable future, and their platform explicitly forbids all nuclear development (including fusion). I think this is a disastrous and useless policy: it avoids technology best suited for drastically reducing waste by converting it into fuel (imagine radio-toxicity reduced to mere hundreds of years as opposed to thousands- the disposal problem essentially becomes a non-issue).
This is not a fantasy. Foundations for this technology were developed back in the 60's at Oak Ridge National Laboratories, and today we call this the Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactor (LFTR or even Molten Salt Reactor). The advantages are numerous: inherent stability (no meltdown possible), abundant fuel (thorium is 3-4 times as abundant as uranium), low start-up requirements (less than a couple tons of fissile material is needed- critical for scalability), proliferation resistant (U-233 is always contaminated with radioactive U-232), more than 100 times as efficient as the current fuel cycle, drastically reduced waste due to efficiency, considerably lower costs due to many factors, especially safety, and the list goes on. We need to be asking ourselves why we are not aggressively pursuing this promising technology. Cheap abundant energy is our best choice for both securing our future and dramatically reducing the prevalence of poverty throughout the rest of the world. The ability for our economy to provide the services we need is utterly dependent on energy.
In case you are not convinced that this path is necessary to avoid the most dire consequences of global economic collapse, I suggest checking out:
Energy lecture by a theoretical physicist: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeGijutBSx0
Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air: http://www.withouthotair.com/
Advantages of LFTR: http://energyfromthorium.com/lftradsrisks.html
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: http://energyfromthorium.com/essay3rs/
Our energy future is not a trivial concern. If we make the right choices, we will revitalize our economy, avoid the worst consequences of our ignorance, eliminate poverty, and live comfortably for thousands, if not millions of more years. Can you think that far ahead?
Just remember that a lot of people HAVE and WILL be impacted by this. This might be an academic debate for most of the world, but for a minority of millions, there are real consequences. I have had to hear various "professionals" at safe distances claim that there was no meltdown, no risk of radioactivity leakage, and continue to downplay the event as much as possible until confirmed facts of the contrary made it out. I have friends with small children who have decided to stay as a consequence, only to find out later that they had been lied to.
I have lost a lifestyle that took me a decade and half of hard work to earn. I will never be compensated for this loss. If you want a rational discussion regarding this technology, first make sure that there is a rational system in place to cover the risks involved (I would have purchased "fallout" insurance, had it been available). Also, stop the downplaying of events until this situation really is clear (which will probably be years from now). For the people who are having to decide to leave or stay, it really makes the pro-nuke side seem like a bunch of sociopaths when they downplay only to be proven wrong by the facts later. If you really think the situation is not bad, quietly start buying up Japanese stocks (and contact me if you are interested in real estate).
P.S. I was for nuclear power until Fukushima screwed me over . . .
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
While I want solar to win, the cost to produce a panel in energy is more than the panel will generate (dollars for dollars over a typical/reasonable 25 year return period).
That's only true if you put the panel on your roof yourself, and further it is only true in places without net metering. I guarantee you that implementing net metering will fix this problem entirely. Solar panels could pay back the energy cost of their construction in seven years in the 1970s and thin film panels are under three years today.
Right now, in my area, solar companies are financing their own installations, and selling the power to the business on whose roof they've placed the panels. The cost? $0.30/kWh on a 30 year contract. That may be a bargain 15 years from now, but commercial rates are still just under $0.10/kWh right now.
Either commercial rates are too low or residential rates are too high.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
One of the huge advantages of nuclear fuel, is that, if you are using it *efficiently* (e.g. recycling it in something like an Integral Fast Reactor), one ton of fuel is the equivalent of millions of tons of coal or oil.
What this means is that a country can buy a *relatively* small quantity of Uranium or Thorium, and it might represent 100 years supply of energy. You couldn't easily store 100 years worth of coal - it would be the size of 10 large mountains or something, and would be crazy expensive to buy and store.
100 years worth of thorium or uranium would be large and expensive, but quite manageable for a government or large corporation to do. It would be much cheaper and much smaller than coal.
This means that you can have long negotiating cycles. There's also quite a few countries with Uranium (and, I've heard it said that there's probably a lot of undiscovered Uranium out there, as it hasn't been prospected for anywhere nearly as aggressively as coal and oil), and as the other poster who replied before me pointed out, almost every country has Thorium.
Part of the problem for supply of oil, coal, etc is that we can't buy it faster than it is consumed, and we can't easily store large surpluses (there is, of course, in the U.S. at least, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, but even that is really pretty small - I think a few months' worth of supply?). This makes us very vulnerable to market swings in price.
With Nuclear Fuel, if you've got 20 or 50 years' supply already on-hand, you've got a nice long negotiating cycle in which to get sellers to lower the price. Then, you buy more when the price is right.
Bonus: any country which has already been running nuclear power programs for a couple decades, most likely already has hundreds of years' supply of Uranium in the form of "Spent Nuclear Fuel". What we call "Nuclear Waste", at least here in the U.S. still has about 98-99 percent of its potential energy unused.
So, here in the U.S., we're sitting on, very roughly, 50 years of nuclear waste, which should be able to give us 50 years * 99, worth of energy. OK, that's a bit of a simplification - if we greatly increased our annual production of nuclear power compared to what we produced in the past, you might cut that in half or a quarter (possibly even more). Say anywhere from 500-4000 years of nuclear fuel, depending on how much we increase our nuclear power production.
There's also "depleted uranium", which could be added to the fuel mix in some of the "recycling reactor" designs (the technical name for a recycling reactor is a "fast breeder reactor" - which is a scary sounding name, but they aren't more dangerous than a "thermal reactor", which is what today's reactors are). The above estimate about using nuclear fuel more efficiently also is based upon using the spent nuclear fuel in a fast breeder.
If you use depleted Uranium in a fast breeder reactor, you can again extended the fuel supply by another huge amount. For every ton of Enriched Uranium fuel that has been produce, about 6.5 tons of depleted uranium is produced. Using that in a breeder reactor, again using the 'simplified' estimating approach above, gives us something like 50 years * 6.5 * 100 = 32, 500 years' supply. If you assume we quadruple nuclear power production (so that supply is cut by 1/4), that still gives us something like 8000 years' supply of fuel.
Coal and gas have been running advertising campaigns trying to reassure people we have 100-300 years' supply (about 100 in the case of gas - and that's at *current* consumption rates, which look set to double or triple if we start building a lot of gas power plants and gas-backed solar/wind farms; closer to 200-300 years for coal).
Nuclear is the only fuel-based energy source which can credibly claim around 10,000 years' supply, *at the very minimum*. Solar and Wind, of course, can claim energy supply until the Sun dies; I have some hope solar and wind (and necessary supporting technologies like grid-scale energy storage systems) can mature to help provide part of our energy needs, but I just don't see them, based on the current technology, providing more than about 20 percent of our power.