Slashdot Mirror
The EPA Carbon Plan: Coal Loses, But Who Wins?
Lasrick writes: Mark Cooper with one of the best explanations of some of the most pressing details on the new EPA rule change: 'The claims and counterclaims about EPA's proposed carbon pollution standards have filled the air: It will boost nuclear. It will expand renewables. It promotes energy efficiency. It will kill coal. It changes everything. It accomplishes almost nothing.' Cooper notes that although it's clear that coal is the big loser in the rule change, the rule itself doesn't really pick winners in terms of offering sweet deals for any particular technology; however, it seems that nuclear is also a loser in this formulation, because 'Assuming that states generally adhere to the prime directive of public utility resource acquisition—choosing the lowest-cost approach—the proposed rule will not alter the dismal prospects of nuclear power...' Nuclear power does seem to be struggling with economic burdens and a reluctance from taxpayers to pay continuing subsides in areas such as storage and cleanup. It seems that nuclear is another loser in the new EPA rule change.
I think you can be sure no matter how this plays out, power is going to be more expensive. In addition, if the coal-fired plants are removed from the equation before replacement sources of power are in place, there will be power shortages.
The idea is that we reduce carbon emissions to slow the rate of the effects on climate. They're not trying to pick winners and losers; why would you try and make winners and losers out of this?
All of the non-coal fuels each have their own challenges, and this rule doesn't alter that. It's like free market, but with the addition that the cost of altering the climate is factored into regulation because a commodity-priced market is unable to react to a result with a 100 year return period.
You still can't find anybody willing and able to properly store spent nuclear fuel, nor someone looking to invest billions of dollars and a decade of zero income in an industry which has a low-growth potential.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
We freeze in the dark.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Nuclear reactors stand and fall mostly on their own, what the government does is determine if you can open one. Because of our dear presidents own stance, we will not be opening new nuclear plants until he's gone. Nuclear is the cheapest per megawatt power source we currently have. Renewable are nice, but they cannot provide base load, they take a far longer payback time period than nuclear, they continue to advance(meaning the new stuff will be out dated before it pays for itself), they are only usable in certain areas, etc. You want to tell me that the government screwing nuclear power by making reprocessing illegal is a subsidy? If they were allowed to reprocess then the amount of nuclear waste would drop dramatically, costs would drop further, we wouldn't have such a shortage of medical isotopes, etc. The problem is that nuclear power has been demonized and made to seem useless. You think that if nuclear couldn't compete it would be the heart of all of the most effective warships on the planet, the reasons it isn't used in satellites are mostly treaties and laws, the other is mass and heat dissipation from higher power plants. Hell, nuclear is the most viable option to reduce environmental impacts in a manner which preserves quality of life, requires minimal governmental interference, and does not require that researchers create regular miracles just to keep society working.
EPA wasn't on the ballot.
If they were though, I might not have voted for them, because they are such hypocrites. Get caught by them with so much as a dirty old eagle feather found in a ditch, and see what happens to you. Yet windmills in CA are up to 3000 Golden Eagles killed, and like 1 point something million birds total. Free pass. Doesn't matter if I love windmills or not; the birds are worth protecting with felonies and giant fines for regular citizens, or they are not. I'm a big fan of equality under the law.
My power bill is high as fuck now. So are other peoples'. I can't think of a reason why the EPA would care about that though.
Where is my Congress?
Are you suggesting we should deregulate nuclear power and just trust the industry to do the right thing? I think not, especially as long as US taxpayers are on the hook for any major failure of a nuclear power plant via the Price-Anderson Act.
Of course nuclear power doesn't seem viable if you look at it's current state! All the reactors we have now were designed in the '50s. They use water as a moderator (ie thermal neutrons) and coolant, requiring complex assemblies of fuel rods and control rods. Thermal neutrons also cause way more incidental nuclear waste (irradiated steel cores, wires, etc). They use
It doesn't have to be that way! The most recent design for a fast reactor seems to be the most legitimate and feasible new design to date. It's called the dual fluid reactor. http://dual-fluid-reactor.org/
It separates the fuel loop from the coolant loop. This has numerous advantages. You can alter the rate of either independently to best suit the current need. The coolant used isn't liquid sodium. Which, aside from not playing nice with air and water has a low boiling point and high neutron cross section. This reactor uses liquid lead as its coolant. Its so stable and resistant to radiation that the coolant loop can be piped into the non-containment area for power generation. In the papers I've read they mention coupling it to an MHR generator then a super-critical water loop en route to turbines.
It is engineered to run at 1000C, which at that temperature, makes it possible to do pyro-chemistry with electrodes to filter out the daught products in line with the fuel loop. The separated daughter products are then sent to a passive cooling chamber (the super short lived ones are hooked up to the coolant loop where it contributes to energy production) where they remain hella hot for a few hundred years. Then they become inert. There are supposedly lots of valuble metals after about 90 years that make the waste itself a hot commodity.
The reactor is designed to be a 2 meter cube, for simple production there are no bowed parts, only 90 angles with straight pipes. A reactor this size can put out 1500MW thermal.
Couple this with the recent advancement of laser-based particle accelerators and you wouldn't even have to start with enriched fuel! The power required to drive the laser would be
As Elon Musk would say (probably): Seriously guys, it's the 21st century, act like it!
Solyndra was just a talking point for the Republicans to pound the President on. The program that the Solyndra loan was a part of was budgeted for a 10 or 11% loss rate and even with Solyndra it still had less than 5% losses. Solyndra lost out because of the unexpected drop in prices of solar modules from China that it couldn't compete with. It's unreasonable to expect that everything that gets tried like this will work out.
The rule change doesn't help (or hurt) nuclear power and so therefore nuclear power loses? That's an interesting line of reasoning. I suppose FIFA, dirigibles, and panda bears are also losers in this rule change too, then.
You do realise that regulations are what forms an economic market, right?
For instance, how would a stock market operate without property law? This is not to say that all regulation are good or even necessary but if your are going to bitch about them you need to be specific, precisely which regulations/policies do you see holding back the uptake of safe and clean nuclear reactors? - The one that says they are responsible for cleaning up their own mess and cannot rely on the taxpayer to do so in 40yrs time? Should we make a rule that forces insurance companies to underwrite nuclear reactors against their better judgement? Should the NIMBY's be excluded from the decision process by law?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
> I think you can be sure no matter how this plays out, power is going to be more expensive.
No, you can't be sure of that. Wind power in the central portion of the country is cheaper than coal now. PV is cheaper than market power in the Southwest and the Northeast now. Many coal plants in tUSA are 50+ years old -- they're going to retire soon one way or another. And, not for nothing, wholesale electric power is cheaper now than it was five years ago due to cheap natural gas (and, by the way, switching from coal to gas helps comply with 111(d) and saves money).
> if the coal-fired plants are removed from the equation before replacement sources of power are in place, there will be power shortage
If my aunt had nuts, she'd be my uncle. There's absolutely no chance that 111(d) will result in reliability performance below the industry standard 1-day-in-10-years. Just won't happen. Retiring a unit requires years of planning. Google "integrated resource plan IRP" for your favorite utility and hunker down to a ~120 page report, produced every 3-5 years, laying out the company's plan, including projected retirements, new units, new transmission, etc.
111(d) doesn't require any coal plants to retire. It requires our fraction of electricity generated from coal to be reduced. The coal plants can still be "plugged in" and operated during times of peak load (weekday summer afternoons and winter mornings); what they can't do is operate much the rest of the time. Instead, a combination of new energy efficiency measures, new renewable energy production, more frequent operating of combined cycle natural gas generators, and squeezing even more MWh out of existing nuclear units through uprates or reduced downtimes will be the way states will comply with 111(d).
Seriously slashdot. Pithy remarks more frequently display ignorance than insightfulness.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
Peak demand isn't as close to daylight as you might expect in the South. In fact, many systems are winter peaking (central Florida and Appalachia come to mind). Those systems peak winter 7-10am. Sure, the sun is just starting to come up, but PV isn't going to have a significant impact on that peak. Similarly, peak is 3-6pm. PV produces it's best power at high noon. As more PV comes on the system, the "net"-peak will push to 4-7pm, then 5-8pm. Again, solar contributes to meeting some of that peak, but depending on geography it isn't always going to align as well as you might think, including in the south.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
If your bills are going up 50%, its because your electric company is spending lots of money on existing coal plants so they emit less SO2, NOx, PM, and Hg. Of course, they'll emit about the same amount of CO2. Utilities that haven't insisted on coal coal coal haven't seen substantial increases in rates.
This is a generality -- individual utilities may have rate increases for other reasons, but very, very few utilities have had rates go up by 50% within the past 3 years. In fact, many utilities have had rate decreases.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
Yes. Because STORAGE was the problem at Fukushima.
Sorry son. Shitty MANAGEMENT and lazy engineering practice, plus a metric fuckton of "Mother Nature Always Wins"
The plant actually SURVIVED a magnitude 9.0 earthquake.
The reason it finally overheated was because the asshats at TEPCO ignored the calls of real engineers for a MUCH higher sea wall. So the tsunami set off by the TÅhoku quake may as well have had valet parking at the reactor when it hit land.
Right now we have the ability to build reactors that are PASSIVELY safe. It means you don't have to worry about failures in ACTIVE, mechanical cooling systems. When such a reactor is shut down, it dumps its fuel into a dump tank and the entire reactor simply cools off. No need to worry if the generators will kick in. No need to worry if the facility loses power. Natural, powered by a little thing we call GRAVITY. It's about as idiot proof as you're going to get until we figure out how to spot-reverse gravity.
And yes, there's always going to be SOME waste.
The stuff that they're pulling out of reactors today? Mildly radioactive. And will be for hundreds or thousands of years.
The stuff you would pull out of a liquid fuel reactor?
1: Medically useful.
2: Shitty bomb-making material.
3: Scientifically useful (and an element we actually can't get any more of).
4: HIGHLY radioactive. But INCREDIBLY short-lived. Some of it is gone within hours of extraction. The longest lived stuff will be a few years cooking off. As opposed to MILLENNIA with current solid-fuel reactors.
Ideal application for reactors such as these is to take them and bury them in concrete. Let them run their usable lifetime and then decommission them. Once it hits EOL, you drain the device and cap it. Then give it a decade or two to cool off (radiologically speaking).
Maybe we CANNOT guarantee that we can build a facility that'll last thousands of years, through god-knows-what. But storage bunkers intended for product with a 10-50 year shelf-life? Pfft.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
Half a century (plus) and counting.
And remember, these things can be fairly compact and relatively light (they were initially designed as a power system for a plane). These things could replace diesel generators and even small hydro installations. WORLDWIDE.
Yes. Dropping one into the San Andreas Fault, or Yellowstone National Park, or the New Madrid Fault would probably be a FUCKING DUMB IDEA.
So here's a smarter one. We don't DO that. We drop them in more geologically stable areas instead.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The earth atmosphere has not warmed for 12-17 years depending on which temperature series you look at.
That only works if you ignore the oceans where over 90% of the heat goes.
The government has been running different programs like that for a long time (more than 50 years) to help encourage new technologies to get off the ground. They always write in a 10 or 15% loss rate into them and the programs seldom reach that rate. In fact the boost to the economy for the ones that do succeed probably far outweigh any losses in the programs.
Source:
http://www.energyfactcheck.org...
-----
(copypasta)
The DOE loan guarantee program is an overwhelmingly successful program that played a critical role in the development of new renewable energy technologies by offering long-term capital when private financing was not available.
The Department of Energy Loan Guarantee Program has an approximately 97% success rate. As of late July, 2012, Solyndra, Abound Solar and the handful of other DOE-backed renewable energy companies that went bankrupt represented total investments of less than 3% of the entire DOE portfolio. (Source: U.S. Department of Energy, April 2013, http://1.usa.gov/Nv1OeU)
It was well-known that the DOE’s loan programs would include a measured amount of risk. Before offering loan guarantees, Congress moved to protect taxpayers by appropriating nearly $10 billion to cover potential losses, acknowledging the risks of funding new technologies in industries that were facing significant market and economic challenges. (Source: Department of Energy, April 2013, http://1.usa.gov/10dWZIE)
Following reports of Fisker Automotive’s financial difficulties, the Department of Energy acted decisively to protect the taxpayers’ interest. In June 2011, the Department ceased making disbursements to Fisker after the company began to fall short of the milestones required in the loan agreement. (Source: Department of Energy, April 2013, http://1.usa.gov/10dWZIE)
There is no evidence to suggest that Fisker Automotive’s loan was a political handout. Fisker was approached by the Bush administration about a potential loan in 2008. In early 2009, Fisker underwent a nine month-long review by DOE and several independent consulting firms to assess all aspects of Fisker’s business plan, technology, and finances. In 2009 – nearly 4 years ago – their business was deemed sound. (Source: House Oversight Committee, April 2013, http://1.usa.gov/10dWgY6)
The Loan Guarantee Program (LGP) and Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing (ATVM) loan program have many success stories. For example, as the American automobile industry fought to recover from the brink of collapse in 2008, DOE provided a $5.9 billion loan to Ford Motor Company to upgrade and modernize thirteen factories across six states. (Source: Department of Energy, April 2013, http://1.usa.gov/10dWZIE)
Another success story: In early March, 2013, Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk announced that Tesla will pay off their $465 million federal loan in five years, rather than the 10 years specified in the loan. The company made its first payment of nearly $13 million in December 2012 and hopes to pay off the loan by 2017 – 5 years ahead of the 2022 deadline. (Source: Associated Press, February 2013, http://bit.ly/WpP4b1)
Loan guarantees have a long history in the United States, and have been used to support many of America’s critical industries, including housing, transportation and agriculture. (Source: DBL Investors, September 2011, http://bit.ly/uV14lf)
The Loan Guarantee Program is not part of the Obama stimulus. The LGP was created in 2005 with bipartisan support under the George W. Bush administration and designed to provide government support for “innovative technologies.” (Source: CNNMoney, J
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
You really dont understand plain English do you.
Private sector: 70% failure is acceptable and usually still yields a profit.
DOE: 11% is the goal. They achieved only 3%.
Again: Solyndra and the couple of others that failed represent only 3% of all funds the DOE loaned out.
Minor footnote? This is one of the most successful loan programs the government has ever run.
The few that failed did so because of the Chinese flooding the market with cheap panels they couldn't compete with.
Meanwhile they've had more than 19 others that are unequivocal successes, right now, today, including Tesla Motors the most famous example.
Your view is as ignorant as you are.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
What magically caused the oceans to all the sudden be so important other than excusing a gap in warming?
I mean why were they ignored previosly and cannot be ignored now? Its a bit like comparing apples to cars when the goal posts are changed to keep this warming notion alive.
> in Southern states where peak demand is during daylight hours.
Specifically, 11AM-2PM. Human eyes see brightness log(n), so we don't realize that the sunshine is a hundred times brighter at some times than at others. It would suck if noon appeared to be a hundred times as bright as morning, so our eyes compress the difference. Solar panels DO notice that, and don't produce much at all during what we call daylight 7AM-10AM and 3PM-8PM. Same with cloudy days. What looks to be a little bit less bright is actually FAR less energy.
So what you end up with is "southern states, for a few hours per day while everyone is at work, on sunny days". Peak usage in most cases when people get home from work, turn on the TV and start cooking dinner. At that time, there's no solar available. Also in the morning when everyone is rushing around blow-drying their hair, microwaving breakfast, etc. Solar is AWESOME in theory, at first glance. Beyond that first glance, looking at the details, it starts to look like we've wasted a few billion dollars that could have saved about 200 million hungry people.
Rich crony capitalists earned vast amounts of money, a little part of which they donated to certain political interests. How can you not have noticed the boost in that?
People like Nancy Pelosi don't get rich on their own, ya know.
Let's take the example of Tesla Motors, mentioned above. The received $465 million in government guaranteed loans which they've since paid off. In January of 2014 they employed about 6,000 people (up from nearly 3,000 in December 2012), most of them well paid. They're also have supply chains for the parts they don't make in-house. They had over $2 billion in revenue in 2013. That's a nice chunk of economic activity they're driving. I'd say that's a pretty good return on investment.
They are deliberately hiding the other sorts of failures, such as building something that has negative ROI.
Perhaps you could provide us some concrete examples of some projects that have a negative ROI but aren't contributing to the failure rate of the program. If they're as common as you say they are that can't be too hard.
The coal plants can still be "plugged in" and operated during times of peak load (weekday summer afternoons and winter mornings); what they can't do is operate much the rest of the time.
The problem with this is that coal plants can't operate this way. A typical coal plant takes 4-8 hours to reach full power from a warm start and can take 24 hours to cold start. This is why we currently use them for baseload power and use other sources (mostly natural gas and hydro) for load following.
Enigma
Isn't it obvious that in the near-term, fracking wins?
Let us hope that the methane it leaks doesn't do more damage than the carbon emissions it saves.
The plant actually SURVIVED a magnitude 9.0 earthquake.
No, it was damaged by the earthquake and that damage was a major contributory factor to the subsequent meltdowns. Here are two NHK documentaries about what happened. They are 45 minutes each but well worth watching if you want to know what the current understanding of the disaster is:
http://youtu.be/vpA0TOgB9-o
http://youtu.be/ayW4mC1o8CQ
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC