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Should Nuclear and Renewable Energy Supporters Stop Fighting?
Lasrick writes "A debate is happening in the pages of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that started with their publication of 'Nuclear vs. Renewables: Divided They Fall,' an article by Dawn Stover that chides nuclear energy advocates and advocates of renewable energy for bickering over the deck chairs while climate change sinks the ship, and while the fossil fuel industry reaps the rewards of the clean energy camp's refusal to work together. Many of the clean energy folks took umbrage at the description of nuclear power as 'clean energy,' so the Civil Society Institute has responded with a detailed look at exactly why they believe nuclear power will not be needed as the world transitions to clean energy."
Should we prevent the spread of headlines that end in a question mark?
Enigma
The rebuttal loses me with this line:
"Nuclear power plants (large or small) and renewables are not compatible technologies. A distributed grid design with high penetrations of variable renewables requires flexible technologies for balancing the system. Both nuclear and coal plants are inflexible. "
Maybe they don't get what people mean by "flexible" in regards to the grid?
When people say coal and nuclear are flexible, they don't mean you can move the plant, or install and remove plants at will. What they mean is that the energy production can ramp up quickly when 15,000 people all get home from work and cut their AC on at the same moment...
yes renewable sources are improving how they can scale and ramp up.
Nukes are already there. I'm also annoyed at how articles claim normal tax items (vehicle fleet depreciation, etc) as subsidies for one industry, but then say industry X doesn't get subsidies. EVERYONE gets some form of tax breaks when you fill out your taxes. If you don't claim them, well, then that's on you.
The original article is right. We SHOULD push for more nukes as well as more renewable sources. Getting off of coal / diesel should be the first priority. Eventually if we can wean from nuclear? cool...
I am 31337 or something.
I think nuclear plant should produce hydrogen during low load period and that cars should run on hydrogen.
Hydrogen powered cars face huge technological and economic hurdles with no solutions on the horizon. Unless there are unforeseen breakthroughs, the car of the future is going to be powered by electric batteries, not hydrogen. Besides, electricity-to-hydrogen-back-to-electricity has a round trip efficiency of less than 50%.
In Germany, they have stopped using nuclear, the result is more pollution caused by coal.
Germany is a classic example of idiotic and counter-productive policies driven by environmentalism run amok. There are some good arguments against building new nukes. But it is insane to shutdown existing nukes. Their solar energy mandates are another example of bad policy: they have resulted in a large percentage of the world's solar panels being installed in one of the cloudiest places on earth, rather than where they actually make sense.
The Green Party in Germany has had a taste of political power, and like most idealists, they have abandoned their ideals in pursuit of more power. So they engage in sound-bite politics and propose simplistic solutions to complex problems. The environment suffers, but hey, their poll numbers to up!
If there has not been such huge pushback on nuclear reactors for decades, there would be far fewer coal fired plants now across the world.
Look at what France has done, the rest of the world could be just as clean. But we are not, and you can thank supposed "environmentalist" for direct harm for the very thing they claim to want to help.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yes, that is why nuclear powered ships and subs have to boil the ocean, clouding port cities with steam whenever they want to stop... no wait, they don't. They just turn down their variable output. Nuclear is the perfect partner power generation to renewable.
They can simply lower the control rods in the reactor when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing:
http://www.duke-energy.com/about-energy/generating-electricity/nuclear-how.asp
Until fusion is everywhere, not one single energy source can serve our needs:
1: Thorium fission reactors need a look at. Yes, there have been working ones, almost 40 years ago. Cheap, effective, scalable, and a lot of energy in a relatively small chunk of real estate.
2: We need energy dense batteries. We have come a long way, but things will change big time when we start getting within an order of magnitude of gasoline for energy stored per volume. When this happens, car engines can be tossed for electric motors.
3: With all the advances in solar, from window tint PV panels to cheap panels for large surfaces, to high efficiency panels to get the best bang per buck out of small areas (RV rooftops), solar is a "why not?", rather than a "why?". The best use would be hybrid systems that can charge batteries, and when the batteries are charged, then feed the grid. That way, one is guaranteed very clean power on the circuits the batteries feed (assuming a quality inverter.) Solar is a must have for virtually any installation.
France uses their nuclear plants for load-following: they can ramp up/down their nuclear plants at about 5% per minute. That means that you only need to back your wind/solar with a few minutes worth of battery capacity to work in tandem with the nuclear plants.
Also, hippies don't compromise. Once they have it in their head that solar and wind are the way to go, then those are the ONLY way to go and YOU MUST DO IT THAT WAY AND NO OTHER WAY!!!!!!! No amount of reasoning will sell them on hydroelectric, nuclear, or natural gas (even pointing out that they're all much better for reducing CO2 than continuing with coal).
For environmentalists, it's not about taking reasonable steps, making reasonable compromises, working together, etc. It's about a cause. And the best causes for them are the ones that they can't win, allowing them to relish in the warmth of perpetual self-righteous victimhood.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
The GP is presenting a false dichotomy.
You can store the excess output from those inflexible nuclear power plants in a way that it can be released quickly to smooth out spikes in demand.
We do that by (eg.) pumping water uphill to reservoirs then letting it flow downhill through turbines when the adverts come on TV and everybody goes and makes a cup of tea... (or grabs a beer from the fridge, or whatever else they do in the uncivilized world).
The real problems come on cloudy days when there's no wind. On those days you need enough capacity in you nuclear plants to make up the deficit.
No sig today...
A lot of this talk about nuclear power plants or even coal powered power plants being inflexible is nonsense. They are run continuously because this is more energy efficient. However there is nothing stopping you from burning less coal. In France it is common to partially off nuclear power plants during the night:
In France, however, nuclear power plants use load following. French PWRs use "grey" control rods, in order to replace chemical shim, without introducing a large perturbation of the power distribution. These plants have the capability to make power changes between 30% and 100% of rated power, with a slope of 5% of rated power per minute. Their licensing permits them to respond very quickly to the grid requirements.
Your statement is false and shows a lack of knowledge of nuclear reactor design and operation.
It is quite easy to ramp up electrical output from a nuclear power plant. A good example if a nuclear powered ship or submarine, both of which need to be able to accelerate quickly. Both use electric motors to turn the screws which move the vessel through the water. The electricity is provided via generators connected to steam turbines which are fed steam provided by steam generators heated by the nuclear reactors.
If more electricity is needed, increase the steam flow and the power output of the plant. The stored heat in the reactor coolant maintains the steam output while the reactor ramps up heat production.
If less electricity is needed, decrease the steam flow and the power output of the plant. The excess heat is stored in the reactor coolant as increased heat and pressure. This can be bled off by running the reactor at a lower power level.
If you are wondering how I know this, it is because I have actually training in nuclear reactor plant design and operation.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Come on, there have been a ton of advances around storing hydrogen, and building fuel cells generally - also around extracting Hydrogen.
Not enough to base our infrastructure on those advances. Hydrogen powered cars face three obstacles - one technological and two economic. The teachnological one is developing a functioning technology. There are hurdles to overcome but there is reason to believe they could be overcome. After all, fuel cells and the like are already in existence and prototype vehicles have been made. The much bigger problem is economic. The first economic problem is that hydrogen powered cars are expensive because there is no manufacturing economies of scale, supporting industries and a limited manufacturing base. Absent some sort of subsidy they cannot be produced for a price in the near term that is competitive with existing vehicles. The second economic problem and the real killer is that there is no fuel infrastructure in place and developing one would be hugely expensive. We have infrastructure in place for natural gas, petroleum/diesel products and electricity. Anything that doesn't use one of those three things is essentially starting from scratch.
The truth is that if you want every person to own an electric car, Hydrogen is the only way you get there.
Not even remotely. Hybrids are the path of least resistance (no pun intended) towards electric vehicles. Electric vehicles based on batteries become practical once you solve the charging time problem. Basically you have to get charging time down below about 10 minutes for at least 200 miles of range. We're almost there technologically already.
You cannot manufacture a literal ton of batteries per person across the globe
Actually you probably can. Every vehicle made already has at least one battery in it and it wouldn't be all that complicated to scale up production unless there is some sort of raw material limitation.
Not the orignal poster,but IMO...
Thorium salt reactors are still "up-and-coming" techniques. Although there have been a small smattering of experiments over time, the only significant testing of the idea was back in the '60s (the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment at Oak Ridge Nation Labs). Although most of the technical hurdles appear to be known, I don't think there is doubt that more work needs to be done to make this production worthy. Some of the biggest issues (e.g, metalugical radiation brittling and salt reprocessing efficiency), are hard to do small scale experiments with so the only real course is to build more experimental reactors to help understand this. Experiments like this are really expensive. The FUJI project (one recent attempt considered to be a leading effort) failed to raise $300M required to build their experimental miniFUJI reactor back in 2011.
There are also secondary effects that are unknown. Uranium mining of past decades created some pretty bad ecological damage and it is unclear that Thorium minining would be any better (or be similarly econonmical with lower impact mining techniques). There is also the issue with decommissioning (even with existing Light-water reactors, this is an ongoing cost concern). At Thorium Salt Reactor have greater fuel efficiency...
One of the continuous knocks against Thorium Salt Reactors has also been nuclear proliferation security issues with reprocessing (since the most efficient configuration for Thorium Salt Reactors is a breeder configuration), but although there are some known safeguards available for denaturing to make bomb-capable material difficult to extract, terrorist level dirty-bomb material is always available in large quantities (a different threat model than in the 60's)...
According to the wiki on Pumped-storage hydroelectricity (PSH), 'PSH accounts for more than 99% of bulk storage capacity worldwide: around 127,000MW, according to the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), the research arm of America's power utilities.' Since in pumping the size of the reservoir is not the limiting factor, but rather the throughput of the pumps, this means that PSH can be used to store the daily output of 127GW worth of power plants. Britain's consumption is 35.8GW on average, and 57.490GW at peak (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_Kingdom), so the global installed PSH's could easily absorb the UK's production.
In the UK, however, there seems to be only one plant (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station), costing 425M GBP in 1974 capable of absorbing around 1GW worth of power, so nowhere near 50% of base load, so it seems that PSH costs around 425M/1G = 0.5 pounds per watt capacity. Apparently, a new nuclear plant costs about US$ 5,339/kW., or 4 pounds per watt capacity, while windmills cost around 1-2 pounds per watt. So, assuming enough sites for PSH can be found, the costs for power storage capacity seems to be 5-25% of the cost for generation capacity.
According to the wiki, "The stalling of the UK nuclear power programme in the late 1980s and the coincident "dash for gas" increased the network's ability to respond to changes in demand, making the use of pumped storage for day/night load balancing less attractive. As a result, a similar facility planned for Exmoor was never built.[2]"; so it seems that at the time the demand is what limited PSH construction, not cost or environmental factors.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/i...
http://www.windustry.org/resou...
A lot of this talk about nuclear power plants or even coal powered power plants being inflexible is nonsense. They are run continuously because this is more energy efficient. However there is nothing stopping you from burning less coal. In France it is common to partially off nuclear power plants during the night:
Nuclear plants do suffer from issues with throttled usage due to the nature of the fuel cycle. It's not that you can't throttle them, it's that as you get later in the fuel cycle it becomes harder and harder to throttle them quickly and keep them from being Xenon poisoned. Add to that the fact that our currently operating nuclear plants where not designed to throttle and you can understand why it's not a good idea. There is also the efficiency issue you cite, and with nuclear power plants running on thin margins to start, this can push them over the edge.
The primary thing to note is that it's basically hard to throttle most industrial sized power generators. Nuclear plants have longer lead times because changing power output of the nuclear core requires more engineering effort than a fossil fueled burner does which needs more effort than your hydro-electric plant. But it is *extremely* difficult to plan electrical power requirements far enough in advance to use our current 30 year old nuclear power plants which where designed to run for decades at static power outputs.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Current power storage that is working at Andasol solar array is Molten salt.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
They recently added enough storage to make power 24 hours a day.
Another power storage scheme is water reservoir pumping, its done
by several US dams already.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Add to that the fact that our currently operating nuclear plants where not designed to throttle and you can understand why it's not a good idea ... Nuclear plants have longer lead times because changing power output of the nuclear core requires more engineering effort than a fossil fueled burner does which needs more effort than your hydro-electric plant. But it is *extremely* difficult to plan electrical power requirements far enough in advance to use our current 30 year old nuclear power plants which where designed to run for decades at static power outputs.
The biggest problem most countries using nuclear power have, is the plants that were built are now much older than they were originally designed to be. On top of that, many of these nuclear plants are using first generation nuclear technology. That is, technology developed not long after the second world war. These plants are inherently dangerous, and the Fukushima-Daichi nuclear disaster proved what can happen when something goes wrong. The thing is, it's not like we haven't developed much safer plant designs since, it's just that since incidents like three-mile island and chernobyl, many people have been against the building of new nuclear plants.To me, this seems crazy, because now many countries are trying to increase the operating life of some very old and unsafe reactors, where we could have built fresh new reactors, which are much safer, more energy efficient, and will most likely age much better. If the anti-nuclear protesters 20 years ago could have seen the impending peak oil crisis, and the global warming crisis, i'm pretty sure they would have shut up and we would have much safer, more flexible, and longer-lasting nuclear plants than the 30-40 year-old reactors many countries are still relying on today.
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
Actually that is not true either. The plants were in fact originally designed to load follow and were only later adapted to constant full power operation based on economic factors. It is not hard at all to engineer the plants to load follow. And xenon poisoning has nothing to do with it, the primary challenge is in axial offset control which becomes more difficult later in the cycle, but only because the cycles are optimized to run at constant full power with maximum fuel loading. It would only require modest adjustments typical of cycle-to-cycle operational changes to design to load follow. IAANE.
40% of US energy goes to heat and cool buildings, that could be easily changed.
I agree with the tax break for upgrading insulation in buildings.
I'd like to see a tax break for those thermal imagers that detect heat/cold
leaks spots in your house similar to what they use to find hot spots
in wiring harnesses of major server rooms.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
That is actually done to a very large extent now. Foundries running electric arc furnaces or induction furnaces only run in the off-peak period, currently at night. This artificially increases base loads.
The problem with trying to match generation with demand is that you still have a transmission/distribution problem. Distributed generation is the only way to really solve that, and again economics make it difficult to distribute power generation to the point where local demand is matched to local production in both capacity and timing.
People are trying to get closer to this-- automated demand response can help a little bit.
The California ISO is pretty open with information. They track daily anticipated demand, actual demand, and available capacity. Some actually predict that solar energy that is not time-shifted will become nearly worthless in five years.
That is exactly the problem. The article makes it seem as if pro-nuclear and greenie types are attacking each other. In fact, the attacks are entirely in one direction: from the greenies, toward nuclear power. I don't see many pro-nuclear people protesting the construction of new wind farms. Nor do pro-nuclear people attack solar power. Usually, pro-nuclear people are comfortable with both nuclear and renewables, and want both.
The greenies insist that power generation must be renewable only, and if they don't get exactly that, then they'd rather just burn coal and have global warming (witness Germany).
From the article:
But greenies obviously do not care about the climate as much as they say they do. It's not among their top priorities. Their first priority is shutting down nuclear power even if that makes climate change worse (witness Germany). Their second priority usually is making sure that food is grown without fertilizer (??). Climate change is usually about their 10th environmental priority, to be sacrificed for any higher priority.
In California, where I live, greenies protest the construction of new solar power plants. Apparently, solar power plants would ruin the desert. Just solar power isn't good enough. It must be solar power exactly where they want it (apparently not in the desert?), or it's just back to burning fossil fuels.
Actually, most are Gen II (if I recall correctly, Gen I was just research reactors). China has some Gen II+. There are also a bunch of Gen III+ reactors out there (I believe Gen III were also only research reactors and production moved to Gen III+). The US is just starting to build Gen III+, partially due to the regulatory snarl in getting them approved.
I'm fairly certain all Gen IV designs require passive safety, but the US abandoned development of these in the 1990s led by John Kerry, largely citing data that applied only to Gen II reactors and proliferation concerns (which is ludicrous - if you're that concerned about proliferation due to continuous reprocessing, make it closed loop and get roughly 80% efficiency of fuel instead of 99.5 and burn up the nations nuclear waste stockpile in the meantime - exactly what Russia is doing) . I'm sure we will be buying these from Russia in a few years, as they are the only country to have them approaching production (well, India is isn't terribly far behind, but the only other one I know of is Japan, and they've not been doing much in the nuclear space recently).