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Japan Has Restarted Five Nuclear Power Reactors In 2018 (oilvoice.com)
With Shikoku Electric Power Company's 890 megawatt (MW) Ikata-3 reactor, Japan has restarted a total of five nuclear reactors in 2018. "Japan had suspended its nuclear fleet in 2013 for mandatory safety checks and upgrades following the 2011 Fukushima accident, and before 2018 only four reactors had been restarted," reports OilVoice. From the report: Following the Fukushima accident, as each Japanese nuclear reactor entered its scheduled maintenance and refueling outage, it was not returned to operation. Between September 2013 and August 2015, Japan's entire reactor fleet was suspended from operation, leaving the country with no nuclear generation. Sendai Units 1 and 2, in Japan's Kagoshima Prefecture, were the first reactors to be restarted in August and October 2015, respectively.
The restart of Japan's nuclear power plants requires the approval of both Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) and the central government, as well as consent from the governments of local prefectures. In July 2013, the NRA issued more stringent safety regulations to address issues dealing with tsunamis and seismic events, complete loss of station power, and emergency preparedness. As part of Japan's long-term energy policy, issued in April 2014, the central government called for the nuclear share of total electricity generation to reach 20%-22% by 2030, which would require 25 to 30 reactors to be in operation by then. In 2017, four operating nuclear reactors provided 3% of Japan's total electricity generation.
The restart of Japan's nuclear power plants requires the approval of both Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) and the central government, as well as consent from the governments of local prefectures. In July 2013, the NRA issued more stringent safety regulations to address issues dealing with tsunamis and seismic events, complete loss of station power, and emergency preparedness. As part of Japan's long-term energy policy, issued in April 2014, the central government called for the nuclear share of total electricity generation to reach 20%-22% by 2030, which would require 25 to 30 reactors to be in operation by then. In 2017, four operating nuclear reactors provided 3% of Japan's total electricity generation.
What is the other 80% of electrical generation?
It seems like if the "fleet" was shutdown and all the generation was lost for 3+ years, why did they need to start turning them on now?
I know safety is taken very seriously these days, that reactor designs are good and not like the RBMK, that reactors don't explode when malfunctioning, that accidents kill very few people if any, and so on, and so forth.
But ensuring all of this takes a lot of people, time, money and effort. You can't just put a nuclear powerplant anywhere you like. It takes years of planning, years of careful construction, then there's constant oversight, lots of security and guards, issues with insurance... while nuclear is a perfectly good technology when viewed in the abstract, it's an enormous pain in the ass in practice.
And that's why eventually it will go away. When faced with the choice of dealing all the stuff above, or just putting a bunch of solar panels/mirrors/wind turbines pretty much anywhere you please with a cheap metal fence around it, it's clear what is the most convenient option.
Eventually it will get to the point where power generation can be solved by just building a lot of small renewable energy powerplants all over the place plus storage, and once that starts happening, nuclear is dead.
Japan is an island nation. The few neighbors within a reasonable distance of an undersea power cable aren't on the best of terms. They don't have much room for wind and solar power, and going off shore isn't a great idea because of those not so friendly neighbors and not so favorable geography. Hydro power potential is minimal. Not much coal in the ground. They have some natural gas but that's getting harder to find every year. Shipping in coal is expensive, and has produced air quality issues.
Japan doesn't have much of a choice other than to restart as many of the existing nuclear power plants that they have and start building many more.
Even in nations with far greater access to coal, natural gas, hydro, sun, and wind, there will be a need to have some nuclear power if you want to have a first world economy like Japan. Or like the USA, Canada, UK, and really any western nation. The question is not if we should have nuclear power but how much. I'm guessing that for much of the world the answer will be somewhere between 20% (like the USA for many years) and 80% (like France was not long ago).
What is the other 80% of electrical generation?
Mostly coal.
It seems like if the "fleet" was shutdown and all the generation was lost for 3+ years, why did they need to start turning them on now?
Because importing all that coal to make up for the lost nuclear electrical generation capacity was costing a lot of money, producing a lot of pollution, and alternatives are far more expensive.
I remember something of a joke I was once told... Do you know what a physician calls "alternative medicine" that works? Medicine.
That's what I think of when people tell me we need more "alternative energy". If "alternative energy" worked then we'd just call it "energy".
I'll believe wind and solar energy can compete with nuclear power when people no longer refer to them as "alternative energy".
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Energy imports. With the natural gas, crude oil. Coal.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Mostly coal.
Nope. In 2015 Japan was:
39% gas
34% coal
9% oil
8.4% hydro
~4.3% other renewables
0.9% nuclear
Data from the IEA: https://www.iea.org/statistics...
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Only you are calling them "alternative energy", most people call it renewable energy.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Either term is fine.
Nuclear power is one of the cleanest energy sources, as well as one of the safest. The fact that a modern industrialized nation like Japan realizes this, should be encouraging for those who care about the planet's climate and health.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Only you are calling them "alternative energy", most people call it renewable energy.
Okay then, define "renewable energy" for me and then tell me how nuclear power does not fit that definition. Let me guess, wind and solar do not require mining fuel from the ground but instead rely on extracting the energy from natural processes that are never ending. Sound about right? Well, that's a nice definition but when wind and solar requires more than ten times the mining to get that energy that seems like a rather misleading definition. Take a look here at the material needed for wind and solar energy: http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2018/08/why-i-favor-nuclear-power.html
All the steel, copper, aluminum, and so on needed for the wires and structures for that wind and solar has to come from somewhere. Kind of like how we need a lot of steel and so on for nuclear power. Oh, and uranium too but that's actually a very small part of the equation since we can get so much energy from so little uranium.
If you believe that "renewable energy" means it's good for the environment then you are quite ignorant on how wind and solar power actually works. If you want to see an environmental disaster then let's get all our energy from wind and solar. People will be begging for something else as the mining needed will be tearing open the earth for the resources required to extract energy from with wind and sunshine.
Oh, and there's enough uranium and thorium in the ground for nuclear power to last well beyond when the sun strips Earth of its atmosphere. We will run out of wind and sun before we run out of nuclear fuel.
Do not feed the trolls. They will go die a miserable death on their own and you are wasting your breath on them
Only you are calling them "alternative energy", most people call it renewable energy.
Okay then, define "renewable energy" for me and then tell me how nuclear power does not fit that definition.
Nuclear power isn't renewable because the fuel is spent, it cannot be renewed. The clue is in the name. It's not a fossil fuel either. Even if your claim that there will still be plenty left when we're done was true it is irrelevant to the question.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
This depends entirely on where you draw your system boundries.
if you draw them att the biosphere. then nuclear energy is renewable as erotion adds new uranium to the biosphere constantly.
This will continue untill the sun engulfs the earth in the distant future.
We can extract this uranium and use it at a given rate and never run out of uranium.
And the rate is large enough to run all of the worlds energyneeds if we use reprocessing and gen4 reactors.
We have the same situation with thorium as with uranium exept that we have about 3 times as much thorium.
What was the other 4.4%? That only adds up to 95.6....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Arguably, breeder reactors do renew the fuel.
And solar is just nuclear power with the reactor fueled at the beginning of the solar system (and yes, it will run out...eventually ;-p) and stored 150 gigameters away...
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
This is good, because having the planets closed caused Japan to have their highest greenhouse gas emissions on record. And Japan is the world's 5th largest in emissions.
Enslaved Pokemon forced to spin giant turbines.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I've been doing a lot of research and have found that most people make decisions about what they think of nuclear energy based on 10 common myths. Knowing the truth about Nuclear Energy leads to better decision-making from top to bottom.
10 Myths about Nuclear Energy:
# 1: Americans get most of their yearly radiation dose from nuclear power plants.
Truth: We are surrounded by naturally occurring radiation. Only 0.005% of the average Americanâ(TM)s yearly radiation dose comes from nuclear power; 100 times less than we get from coal [1], 200 times less than a cross-country flight, and about the same as eating 1 banana per year [2].
# 2: A nuclear reactor can explode like a nuclear bomb.
Truth: It is impossible for a reactor to explode like a nuclear weapon; these weapons contain very special materials in very particular configurations, neither of which are present in a nuclear reactor.
#3: Nuclear energy is bad for the environment.
Truth: Nuclear reactors emit no greenhouse gasses during operation. Over their full lifetimes, they result in comparable emissions to renewable forms of energy such as wind and solar [3]. Nuclear energy requires less land use than most other forms of energy.
# 4: Nuclear energy is not safe.
Truth: Nuclear energy is as safe or safer than any other form of energy available. No member of the public has ever been injured or killed in the entire 50-year history of commercial nuclear power in the U.S. In fact, recent studies have shown that it is safer to work in a nuclear power plant than an office [4].
# 5: There is no solution for huge amounts of nuclear waste being generated.
Truth: All of the used nuclear fuel generated in every nuclear plant in the past 50 years would fill a football field to a depth of less than 10 yards, and 96 % of this âoewasteâ can be recycled [5]. Used fuel is currently being safely stored. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the equivalent scientific advisory panels in every major country support geological disposal of such wastes as the preferred safe method for their ultimate disposal[6].
# 6: Most Americans donâ(TM)t support nuclear power.
Truth: In a survey conducted in September 2013, it was found that 82% of Americans feel nuclear energy will play an important role in meeting the countryâ(TM)s future electricity needs, and half believe this importance will increase with time. In addition, 84% of respondents favor renewing operating licenses for nuclear power plants that continue to meet federal safety standards. Also, 77% believe that nuclear power plants operating in the United States are safe and secure, a four percentage point increase from last February[7].
# 7: An American âoeChernobylâ would kill thousands of people.
Truth: A Chernobyl-type accident could not have happened outside of the Soviet Union because this type of reactor was never built or operated here. The known fatalities during the Chernobyl accident were mostly emergency first responders [8]. Of the people known to have received a high radiation dose, the increase in cancer incidence is too small to measure due to other causes of cancer such as air pollution and tobacco use.
# 8: Nuclear waste cannot be safely transported.
Truth: Used fuel is being safely shipped by truck, rail, and cargo ship today. To date, thousands of shipments have been transported with no leaks or cracks of the specially-designed casks [9].
# 9: Used nuclear fuel is deadly for 10,000 years.
Truth: Used nuclear fuel can be recycled to make new fuel and byproducts [10]. Most of the waste from this process will require a storage time of less than 300 years. Finally, less than 1% is radioactive for 10,000 years. This portion is not much more radioactive than some things found in nature, and can be easily shielded to protect humans and wildlife.
# 10: Nuclear energy canâ(TM)t reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
Truth: Nuclear-generated electri
Well, after a wind tower reaches its end of life in 20, maybe 25 years, you can recycle the metals pretty easily. The plastics used to insulate wires, etc. not so much. Doubt much of a solar panel can be recycled, but I don't have any figures off the top of my head on their lifecycle, might not be as ultra short as wind towers, which are subject to lots of stress, with many parts needing to be as light as possible, forcing engineers into tough yield (of power) and longevity tradeoffs, and they're badly exposed to the elements. Solar cells, you ought to be able to seal them up pretty well, but I have no idea how much they're subject to degradation over time.
Make sure the owners and investors live with their children within 10km of the reactor(s). I won't.
Hopefully Germany will take note. They abandoned nuclear after the Fukushima disaster and effectively abandoned their Energiewende.
Clicking the link proved in the post you replied to, you'll find some more details, such as energy generated from waste incinerators, to account for most of those 4.4%. Though even there some 2% are listed as just "other sources".
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3
20.0% of electricity generated comes from Nuclear power.
(0% of transportation comes from Nuclear, 0% of heating comes from Nuclear.)
Realistically, 1/3rd of energy comes from solar today, but it could easily be 100% if we can store the energy.
Nobody is going back to nuclear. It costs too much to store the waste. They're just improving the storage options.
That fusion reactor may be 150 gigameters away, but it's still a safety hazard! You can't even look at it directly without putting your eyes at risk, not to mention the cancer it causes.
I'll believe wind and solar energy can compete with nuclear power when people no longer refer to them as "alternative energy".
Um, nobody calls wind, solar or hydro "alternative energy".
(Well, almost nobody. Apparently you do...)
"Alternative energy" is all those crackpots on youtube who claim to invent perpetual motion machines.
No sig today...
> Arguably, breeder reactors do renew the fuel.
They convert one resource ("fertile material") into fuel, but since that fertile material is itself not renewable the entire process isn't renewable.
Solar is considered renewable because there is an effectively unlimited supply of sunlight. Even if the sun is only expected to last another few billion years, that is a pretty solid prediction and is so far beyond the horizon it can safely be considered unlimited.
Wind and hydro are renewable because the air and water are not lost forever once they pass through the turbines.
Biofuels are renewable because once you burn them, the carbon that was released into the air can be recaptured by more plants and turned back into biofuel. Logistical issues aside, this is a closed-loop carbon cycle and thus renewable.
Nuclear is not renewable because once the fuel is spent, it's gone. There are some tricks to make new fuel, but there's no reasonable way to take all the waste and put it back into the system ad infinitum. Reprocessing spent fuel just removes contaminants and re-purifies the unused portion; it does not make new fuel from spent fuel.
=Smidge=
"Solar power causes more cancer than all other forms of power generation combined!" Yep, gonna have fun with this one. Now excuse me, I'm off to troll Farcebook
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
On a small volcanic island with somewhat limited space for something like solar and wind nuclear is far and away the best method of providing solid, reliable electricity.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
Yea but didn't they just start buying more power from France and their nuclear power plants?
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Enslaved Pokemon forced to spin giant turbines.
You'd think they could just convert the output from electric-type Pokemon directly, and it would be more efficient... Guess that's being held up by supercap development?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'll believe wind and solar energy can compete with nuclear power when people no longer refer to them as "alternative energy".
Humans were using wind power to do work long before they were using coal to do anything other than produce heat. The idea that wind power is alternative energy is a trick which was pulled upon you by the fossil fuel industry, and here you are feeling all smug about your complicity. How useful of you.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You win this weeks Asperger OCD Blue Ribbon Award which is a remarkable feat for such an aspie-ridden troll-farm shithole like /.
Congratulations! And we welcome you back to try winning again next week! Yay!
Solar cells, you ought to be able to seal them up pretty well, but I have no idea how much they're subject to degradation over time.
Thin-film solar cells can last around twenty years, but will have substantial loss by that time. PC cells can last much longer. This kind of information is readily available via a simple google search, which is how I found it, though I already knew. The truth is that if we had started building solar plants en masse in the 1970s, most of those panels could still be producing over 70% output today. Of course, they probably wouldn't be, because they probably would have been replaced, and the used panels sold as surplus to homeowners who could have made use of them.
Modern solar panels made in countries which care about the environment (read: not China) are required not to leach if landfilled, even if broken up into bits. So they really are the safest form of power, if you don't install them on residential roofs. That's where most of the solar deaths occur. You can install them over parking lots (where the work is done on a scaffold or high-lift and not on the roof itself) or you can install them in open fields, and thereby avoid that problem.
We should have been going solar since the seventies. It may be too late now, but that's no reason not to do it anyway, since it may not be.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I for one have never used the phrase "alternative energy"... sounds like some newage aura claptrap to me.
I call wind energy "wind energy" and solar energy "solar energy" or "solar power"... and thats what my switch panel calls it too.
In fact, i dont think ive ever seen any solar systems that use the phrase "alternative energy"
So you can start believing in it now i guess.
Nuclear, even from an optimist's perspective, seems to be an abjectly terrible idea for the more small scale/dispersed requirements.
True, but what that's saying is primarily that not all sources meet all applications, so we may want to use different energy sources for different applications.
As you say (or imply), solar turns out to be a very good source for distributed small scale applications in regions that have good solar availability-- which is much of the third world, which turns out to be the part of the world that most needs new energy sources.
Nuclear, on the other hand, may be the preferred source for gigawatt-scale baseload power in industrialized areas (which is not to say that you might not also use solar for daytime peaking power).
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
If solar can be considered renewable because of an unlimited supply then so can nuclear. There is more than one type of reactor and not all rely on the same fuel. If they ever get fusion making net energy it will be effectively limitless. There is a few million years worth of Deuterium in the ocean and we can easily make more.
Okay then, define "renewable energy" for me and then tell me how nuclear power does not fit that definition.
Renewable sources use naturally self-renewing resources, with the caveat that the renewal must be over a relatively short term. Another general requirement is that the use of the fuel causes little pollution or environmental damage.
It's a myth that wind and solar require massive amounts of mining. The blog you cite is unconvincing and the sources it cites don't support its conclusion. Do you have something peer reviewed that shows that all the experts in this field calling for more wind and solar power and convincing most of the world of the need for it are in fact wrong?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I remember seeing an article last year about Solar paint. Meaning, you paint the building with this specific paint and it can be used generate clean energy. This was developed in the UK, which is not where I would expect to spend my days sunning on the beach.
A team of researchers from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) has developed a paint that can be used to generate clean energy. The paint combines the titanium oxide already used in many wall paints with a new compound: synthetic molybdenum-sulphide. The latter acts a lot like the silica gel packaged with many consumer products to keep them free from damage by absorbing moisture. According to a report on RMITâ(TM)s website, the material absorbs solar energy as well as moisture from the surrounding air. It can then split the water into hydrogen and oxygen, collecting the hydrogen for use in fuel cells or to power a vehicle. âoe[T]he simple addition of the new material can convert a brick wall into energy harvesting and fuel production real estate,â explained lead researcher Dr. Torben Daeneke.
https://futurism.com/a-new-sol...
This article is from 2017 so I wonder where this type of solution has progressed to. It could resolve the issue of your anal neighbors bitching and moaning that your solar panels are blinding them or blocking their view.
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
Except, you know, the reason they're the Third World is that their populations don't have the intelligence and very much linked culture to even maintain such complicated systems, let alone build them in the first place. One of the clearest and most extreme examples being all those wells naive young Americans dig for villages to provide clean(er) water, only to find they get filled with trash within a few months, assuming they ever bother to go back and check up on things.
Technically solar and wind are not renewable, because once the sun burns out in a billion years it will be done. Technically no energy is renewable since exergy can only be destroyed.
The material used in renewable generation can be recycled.
Nuclear waste issues are complex and not fully resolved. They're not purely technical problems either.
Nuclear safety issues are also complex and not fully resolved. Sure a blue-sky fresh power plant built with the best technologies is a dandy thing, but that's not what we're talking about.
I say this, and I'm pro-nuclear.
The US Navy has been experimenting with synthetic liquid fuels for a long time and all it takes is a little help from Congress to expand the project to prove this as something that can mass produce fuel. Calculations show the fuel can be competitive with petroleum fuel on cost as well.
The carbon for the synthetic fuels come from the air and so the carbon loop is closed, no additional CO2 is added to the air in the process.
Nope. Synthetic liquid fuel ("synfuel") is typically made from either coal, or oil shale.
Check the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
There are biomass conversion technologies, but they're usually called "biofuels", not synfuels.
You can make hydrogen from electricity, and you can make hydrocarbons from hydrogen and carbon dioxide (e.g., by Fischer-tropsch reactions), but at the moment that's a pretty inefficient process, and not economically competitive. (That could change, of course, with better tech).
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
You know, racist assholes like you are not really contributing to the discussion. Why don't you go back to your basement and come out again when you're fit to engage with actual decent humans.
> Arguably, breeder reactors do renew the fuel.
They convert one resource ("fertile material") into fuel, but since that fertile material is itself not renewable the entire process isn't renewable.
U235 is a limited resource, but there is enough u238 minable with current tech for thousands of years, and then there is thorium.
By the time that runs out, we should be close to getting fusion working.
If you make policies pretending that all people are equally intelligent, culturally enlightened, etc., well, you'll get exactly the mess we've made of the current world. You want to pretend that humans are not biologically diverse, when such diversity is celebrated, even championed by our betters, and obvious to anyone with eyes to see (you know, "white", "black", "brown", "yellow", etc.), then have fun living in the fact free basement of your mind, till reality wacks you upside the head.
Which do you suppose is more economical over the long haul?
I've done those calculations. In places that have sun: solar. In places that do not have good sun, nuclear, unless storage or transmission cost goes down. It turns out to be really hard to compete with cheap solar panels if you have sunlight available to power them.
Cool. Then you should start your own solar powered utility. You will make trillions of dollars because everyone will switch to your utility.
I don't need to; it's already happening. Take a look at the ratio of new solar generation installation versus new nuclear generation installation.
Oh, wait, new nuclear generation has an installation rate of zero. So that ratio is infinite.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Carbon waste sequestration from fossil fuel is not remotely solved.
Storage of wind and solar power for 24/7 supply is complex and not fully solved.
Hydro is clean - aside from the pristine valley ecosystems that were wiped out. And Hydro dam failures make Chernobyl look like traffic accident.
If there was a perfect solution, we would be using it.
I'm not even sure what your point about potassium is. Eating a banana does not increase your potassium 40 exposure. This is true whether you use the linear-no-threshold model or not.
As for Thorium cycle reactors, yes, I agree that it's wise to be somewhat skeptical of the technology until some of the details are a bit more developed. The old IAEA report gives some of the basics: https://www-pub.iaea.org/mtcd/... , and there are review papers here and there that give a somewhat more updated view: https://aip.scitation.org/doi/... , for example.
I think it's an interesting enough approach to solving long-term problems that I would like to see some engineering development work done on a prototype to show it's feasible, but I wouldn't want to commit to it without seeing some engineering. There is not a "then a miracle occurs" step, but as with most engineering, the devil is likely to be in the details, and we need to know the details.
In the short term, though, my approach would be to start reprocessing spent reactor fuel. The proliferation concerns can be addressed, and it's simply silly to warehouse it in swimming pools; that's not reasonable by any possible metric.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
This is incorrect. Uranium is approximately as renewable as solar.
The sun will eventually go out, after consuming most of its fuel. You could say we will be dead by then, but we actually have enough uranium in the Earth to last the same amount of time. So they both get "used up" at about the same time.
Also, once the sun is gone a new star will likely eventually be formed. So the sun is actually "renewable". But in a similar way, the old sun's final moments will likely produce more uranium than was ever used on Earth. So uranium is just as renewable as solar.
(And since wind power is really just extremely inefficiently harvested solar power, it has the same issue with the word "renewable")
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
You sound like you're stuck in a false dichotomy.
Meh. Experts are using a mix of solutions and researching renewables. All good from my standpoint. Fossil fuel subsidies and free carbon waste should end though. Carbon taxes etc, would put nuclear on stronger footing.
You can use cooling towers as many plants do, and this is true of all thermal power plants, you need to get rid of waste heat for best thermodynamic efficiency.
Cooling towers don't remove the need for water. It's not a big deal overall, since 75% of the planet is water (and most cities tend to be near one body of water or another) but, no, you can't site them "anywhere". "Dry cooling" exists as a technology, but it's 3-4 times as expensive, and no plants use it in the U.S. (I think that there's one in South Africa).
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
And you still need copper, wires, steel, etc to build power plants, no matter the source. The argument is disingenuous, but then again, most anti-solar folks are.
Don't look at me, I've got a full-on hard-on for nukes and if we can ever figure out fusion, hell yeah. Solar's alright, but it's far from ideal. I think of it like diversifying my investment portfolio: don't put all your eggs in one bag. Relying upon 100% coal and gas is just as stupid as relying upon 100% solar.
Not disingenuous when the solar crowd pretends it's so "clean".
Ummm, relying "100% on coal and gas" is a lot more diversified than relying 100% on solar. In fact, there was a recent report on what they think happened in 538, or per Wikipedia it started in 535. Your technological civilization would not survive a several years long volcanic dust veil drastically reducing your solar radiation. That's one of the few things I like about coal, it's one of the generation methods least prone to common mode failures. Nuclear would be too if not for the politics, although, really, any method has that problem.
That's the dumbest rationale I've heard in a while. Whether it's called alternative energy, or just energy, wind and solar have been beating nuclear on cost for some time now. Almost everywhere in the world. Yes, I'm being lazy and not giving source-links, but a tiny amount of googling will prove this out.
Seems like every post that makes a good point has a 1 score. Somebody doesn't like nuclear power here but they'd better get used to the idea.
the NRA issued more stringent safety regulations to address issues dealing with tsunamis and seismic events, complete loss of station power, and emergency preparedness.
The new regulations are to wear hearing protection while shooting at tsunamis.
True, they tend to call it "renewables", because if they just pushed for "clean" energy, that would include nuclear, and since we all know nuclear power is the ultimate evil anything that might encourage it's use is Bad and Wrong... Green activists that would rather see increases in Greenhouse Gas Emissions are one of the psychological puzzles of the modern world...
9% oil
Sad.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
> but we actually have enough uranium in the Earth to last the same amount of time.
Yeah not even close. Some cursory research and math suggests anywhere from ~200 to ~170,000 years of fuel depending on how efficiently we use it, whether or not we can successfully develop thorium fuel cycles (and how efficiently we can use *that*), and assuming NO GROWTH IN POWER USAGE over 2016 levels.
Even the rosiest of outlooks are a far cry from ~4 billion years.
=Smidge=
You have not lost $10,000.00 worth of panels to a hail storm have you?
OMG, can't believe I've overlooked this issue. Live in Tornado Alley, my family has suffered smaller losses from hail storms, and hail can get pretty big. Yeah, maintenance costs are not going to be small, and in things like this, they're always underestimated.
Enslaved Pokemon forced to spin giant turbines.
If a cat always lands on its feet, and buttered toast always falls butter-side down, what happens will happen if we buttered the back of a cat? Will it spin indefinitely since the universe cannot decide which universal law to enforce? Can this spinning be harnessed for energy?
I guess the 216 TWh of electricity generated by renewables produced in Germany in 2017 (33% of all electricity generated) is a placebo effect then. Or somebody here lives in its own alternative reality where renewables don't work.
A psychological puzzle of the modern world are people who think nuclear is a solution to anything although it has repeatedly shown to be an economical failure.
No. Official numbers are here: https://www.ag-energiebilanzen...
Germany has net exports of 55 TWh of electricity in 2017. It produced 216 TWh of electricity from renewables which is 33% of total production. Energiewende works fine. It is France which once in a while has to import from Germany because nuclear is not too reliable (e.g. in sommer when it gets to hot) or because they have to shut down a large part of the fleet for maintance.
Whichever way you look at it, you're both setting goalposts to change a clear definition to a murky one.
Simple fact is solar isn't renewable and neither is nuclear. "Effectively" is just a cheap way out, and can be applied to anything. Fossil fuels are "effectively" renewable since we keep finding more and more.
BTW: Wind isn't renewable, either, considering it depends on the sun. Neither is wood.
Thank you for using Gigameters instead of Millions of Kilometers.
I hate it when people say crap like that, its like, we created this system of prefixes so we WOULDN'T need to do that.
How much do you pay for that again? 3 times as much as other countries?
Please come back when it's actually competitive.
Mein Gott! I knew it was bad, but per these two sources, one and two, for households it's 33 US cents per kWh, 33.29 from the last and Bing's currency conversion calculator. Three times the general US price indeed, and I've heard its really pinching people in the winter. I guess it was more than low natural gas prices that prompted BASF to do their lastest rounds of expansion in the US, especially Texas, which has its own grid since it's big enough to have a stable one and that avoids a lot of Federal regulation.
Merkel had better hope the current anti-Green counter-revolution in France doesn't spread (which historically has been a bad bet).
When the alternative is paying the Ruskys for gas (and being extorted), Germans are happy to pay more.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
It was far worse. You're right. Coal only took a bit of the gap. Gas did quite a lot, but Oil... They doubled the amount of oil they were burning.
Oh man do I wish they were burning coal instead.
Or, you know, they could have kept their nuclear reactors running, Germans have a safety culture that's up to the job, unlike the Japanese. Per Wikipedia, 8 permanently closed just coincidentally before state elections representing 43% of their nuclear electrical power, the rest by 2022, although I seem to recall some recent waffling about that.
Or, you know, continue and/or resume burning a lot of coal, as nasty as it is. A lack of common failure modes is perhaps its greatest advantage.
And I seriously doubt poorer people "are happy to pay [3 times] more."
I can agree with you for the most part. There's certain things we cannot change but what we can do is bring the infrastructure and training for getting the energy these people need to lift themselves into a first world economy. What I heard one person call this is "hammer and spanner" technology. If you show someone a common diesel engine then they can take it apart and put it back together with hand tools. People have done so for at least 100 years. Solar power takes technology beyond hand tools, something that if there is no electricity in the first place is hard to get working.
What it seems to me that many people fail to realize is that nuclear power is a "hammer and spanner" technology. It doesn't take 2018 technology to get working, it might not even take 1918 technology. We've been fashioning machines from steel for a long time, and concrete structures for far longer. We can bring these third world nations nuclear power far more easily than solar power.
The third world will find solar power worthless quite quickly because they cannot maintain this technology themselves any time soon. Show them nuclear power, which when boiled down to the basics is not all that different than a steam engine from 150 years ago. Certainly they will need to have some technology on detecting radiation and such that did not exist 150 years ago but for the most part the tools are quite basic, and the maintenance simple enough for a high school educated US Navy enlisted sailor to understand.
The US Navy has been training teenagers to operate a nuclear power plant for decades now. If we want to lift third world nations out of poverty then it will take nuclear power, I'm quite convinced of that. The alternative is letting them drill for oil, dig for coal, and generally go through the motions of how the first world got to where it is now but only delayed by 200 years, 300 years, or perhaps even more. We can let them skip over a few steps, and a century of misery and poverty, but that means bringing 2018 scientific knowledge to a society that may not even be at 1918 technology and infrastructure.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
There's nothing murky about it; Does an energy source have the potential to be exploited into the indefinite future?
Since the Sun is expected to last so far into the future it's beyond human capacity for comprehension, the Sun can be considered an inexhaustible source of energy and thus renewable.
Since the amount of fissile material on the planet is finite, and depending on the use case can be completely exhausted within a century or two, nuclear is NOT renewable.
That's very simple.
=Smidge=
It is not three times more. The surcharge for renewables is about 23% of the total price. Here is the decomposition:
https://www.cleanenergywire.or...
And it was a very deliberate political decision to not hide it in general taxes but make the price of electricity higher. The idea is to encourage saving which also works. And yes, poorer people are never happy about higher prices but it is still not a major burden. I would rather be poor in Germany with high electricity prices and social subsidies and free healthcare than most anywhere else.
Only a small part of the price is from the renewable surcharge, please do not misrepresent this.
So, "renewable" energy isn't renewable at all. An "effectively" unlimited supply is not unlimited. The sun will burn itself out one day. The kinetic energy from wind and water is extracted by turbines, so nothing is renewed. It's just plentiful. Same with nuclear energy. So you could actually call them both renewable, or say that nothing truly is. It's just marketing.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Only 23% of the price are surcharge for renewables, it only one of several reasons why the price in Germany is high (and it was relatively high even before the roll-out of renewables). And this was an intentional political decision. Of course, one could also have hidden this in general taxes similar to the subsidies for fossil fuel or nuclear. Finally, this reflects subsidies for renewables installed in the past. And these had the intended effect of creating a market. You might have noticed that price dropped dramatically. Wind power is now competitive and solar is close. These is why there is boom. In contrast, nobody builds nuclear. Guess why? it is not actually competitive.
You guys pay 3 times more than the US. If the surcharge for renewables is 23% of the price, and the ecological tax is a further 7%, it's a big fraction of the total price of electricity in the US-- 90%-- right there-- which is almost half of the 3x difference. Not to mention that the grid fees are higher because your operations are considerably more complicated due to the large fraction of renewables on the grid.
It's a myth that wind and solar require massive amounts of mining.
It requires mining still, no? The dispute is not on if solar and wind require mining, only how much compared to nuclear power. We will have to mine. Claiming that wind and solar has no impact in the environment is a myth. There is an impact which so many people ignore. One is the land needed for these windmills and solar panels. Maybe the land under both can be still be used for other things but there is a natural limit on how much energy can be extracted per area, and that limit is quite small. Nuclear power can produce far more energy per area as proven by ships at sea sailing for decades on a single "fill up" of uranium.
If wind and solar power can compete with nuclear on materials and space then we'd be using that to power our warships instead of nuclear power.
I don't much care if you are unconvinced. I'm not convinced that we can power a first world economy without nuclear power. Japan seems to agree. It seems that the US federal government is slowly coming around to this realization as well. If you think we can do without nuclear power then go ahead and try. If you can make wind and solar cheaper than nuclear power then I will happily admit I was wrong since I'll have more money in my pocket to buy something to wash down the crow I'll be eating.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
A psychological puzzle of the modern world are people who think nuclear is a solution to anything although it has repeatedly shown to be an economical failure.
Then why would Japan restart their nuclear power plants as a cost saving measure?
If alternatives are cheaper then Japan would have abandoned nuclear power completely by now. A psychological puzzle is people continuously claiming nuclear power to be an economical failure when it is producing far more energy in the world today than wind and sun.
Here's where nuclear power is an obvious solution, naval propulsion. We have nuclear powered submarines, aircraft carriers, and icebreakers. These are now so large and powerful that no other energy source could possibly make them work as well as they do. Maybe in the future this will be the only place where nuclear power is used but I point this out as a place where nuclear power is a solution to something.
Nuclear power is a solution to something, possibly only one thing, and I expect it will remain so for centuries.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
It's called "renewable" here. Excluding hydro, it generated 2% of the national total in 2015 and 7% in 2016, about the same as coal. I couldn't find more recent numbers unfortunately. In 2016 there was one province that was 98% wind.
Decent chunk, and growing fast.
I'm curious whether that's actually true.
It's certainly false if you compute the rate per kWh for all power use, including that used to produce food and for life support.
But in absolute terms? How much solar-related skin cancer is there, versus cancer that could be attributed to air and water pollution?
"By the time that runs out"
That phrase is the key to why fission isn't considered a renewable source.
Windmills kill lots of birds and bats. Lots of endangered ones, but that's OK by the weird logic of the Greens, just like minute amounts of mercury you get from coal plants is intolerable, but we had to buy lots of CFLs for our homes, each with its own droplet of mercury when cold and you shattered one by accident. It's almost like they have agendas other than their Official ones....
The laws of thermodynamics: the pedant's best friend.
For actual engineering and public policy decisions, the renewable/non-renewable categorization, as it is conventionally understood, is both meaningful and useful.
They have a team working on that but somehow a 10 year old keeps thwarting them.
Go use the wrong bathroom, you fascist antifa snowflake-lord!
"Prediction: within 10 years, Windows will be a Linux distribution." Me, 7-6-2016
Really... Really? Burning kittens instead of coal would be an example of "alternative energy", but likely not sustainable/renewable. (And likely not going to pass public muster.) Last I checked, the tides still come in and out every day, regardless of how much energy we extract from the process.
Mostly coal.
Nope. In 2015 Japan was:
39% gas 34% coal 9% oil 8.4% hydro ~4.3% other renewables 0.9% nuclear
Data from the IEA: https://www.iea.org/statistics...
So its mostly coal and gas. Such a huge difference. And the question was what replaced nuclear, not what does Japan use. So if that coal was say 20% before 2011, then it was mostly coal that was added. People like you are the reason we will never have carbon free power and use so much coal. And you wonder why greenies don't win elections. Power production is an engineering task. Leave it to the engineers to solve. When politics enters into it, you can be assured that we won't find a good solution to the problem. The coal producers thank you for being such a useful idiot.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
Jerry Brown signed off on closing the Diablo Canyon plant, and throwing away a big chunk of Califonia's clean power generation capability. A functional, paid-for plant that's been working fine-- try explaining that by "economics".
We haven't seen anything like a sane energy market (no carbon tax, no cap-and-trade), and it hasn't quite sunk into people's heads that natural gas is much worse than we thought it was (courtesy of methane leakage).
Fans of solar and wind are excited because "renewables" are up a bit, but natural gas is up a even more... we are not going to save the planet this way, gang.
Last I checked, the tides still come in and out every day, regardless of how much energy we extract from the process.
That energy is coming from somewhere and that's the spinning of the earth. It's barely noticeable over one human lifespan but the days are getting longer, which means there's less tidal power available over time.
I'll believe wind and solar energy can compete with nuclear power when people no longer refer to them as "alternative energy"
What are your thoughts on collected solar power? They are giant mirrors that track the sun to reflect it onto a tower. It heats either water or molten salt, can last overnight. Could that be just 'energy'
"By the time that runs out"
That phrase is the key to why fission isn't considered a renewable source.
It was used in the same humourous context as "by the time the sun runs out". Thorium and U238 are not going to run out in practise, because the timescale makes our current measurement of minable reserves irrelevant. Even with coal, the problem is not one of supply limits.
There doesn't have to be, as only a fraction of a fraction of the Earth's surface would supply all of our energy needs and then some.
PV panels are now often available with 30+ year warranties, and will still produce the majority of their rated capacity for many decades. When all is said and done, solar panel recycling is already a thing in some countries and will inevitably become more common when the solar panels installed in the 1980s finally degrade to the point where they *need* to be replaced (panels made in the past 10 years won't be due for the scrap heap until 2050 or so)
There's no reason to suspect we'll have trouble building solar panels a million years from now, providing we and this planet still exist of course.
=Smidge=
Regardless of the reasons (or potential solutions), an energy strategy based solely around renewables results in higher energy prices. The only countries I've heard that have relatively affordable renewable energy are those with excellent geography for hydroelectric power and has a low population relative to land area, which are unfortunately not that common across the world.
Until a country actually manages lower their electricity costs with renewables, most other countries should approach it with caution.
...one could also have hidden this in general taxes similar to the subsidies for fossil fuel or nuclear.
I heard this a few times, so I looked into it. According to a report from what appears to be a very anti-fossil-fuel organization*, the US spends $20 billion per year on fossil fuel subsidies. Sounds like a lot, but then I remembered that there's fuel taxes. Turns out the US collects $35 billion in fuel taxes. Now there's probably some non-monetary benefits that's not being counted, but if the government is making money from it overall, I don't think it counts as a subsidy.
* Their mission is apparently "exposing the true costs of fossil fuels and facilitating the coming transition towards clean energy", so I'd take their numbers with a slab of red Himalayan rock salt
Windmills kill lots of birds and bats.
That's a lie, so you are a liar. They used to, but then they built them bigger so they could run slower and now they are a barely significant source of bird deaths.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Carbon taxes etc, would put nuclear on stronger footing.
Nope. Nuclear may have much lower lifetime carbon emissions than fossil fuels, but they're still vastly higher than PV or wind. Carbon taxes would be the final nail in the nuclear coffin, since PV and wind are already cheaper than nuclear.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'll believe wind and solar energy can compete with nuclear power when people no longer refer to them as "alternative energy".
Um, nobody calls wind, solar or hydro "alternative energy".
It's not "nobody". In the eighties and nineties, "alternative" was the most common label for these kinds of sources, probably because that's what the entrenched fossil fuel power generation industry called them. It wasn't until more recently that they were successfully rebranded as "renewables".
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
A psychological puzzle of the modern world are people who think nuclear is a solution to anything although it has repeatedly shown to be an economical failure.
The economics have been analyzed to death:
https://www.google.com/search?...
Two thirds of the cost is just repayment of capital.
ie. The main problem is trying to do it privately with borrowed money.
Governments could step up and do it with taxpayer money, that way there's no interest payments and it all works out much better. No politician wants to go near the word "nuclear" though.
No sig today...
I'd be willing to bet it is, in absolute terms. Coal power is the #1 power source that can be directly attributed to pollution that causes cancer. Nuclear has the potential but even considering past disasters exposure is extremely rare. Most other sources have no real potential for causing cancers.
As for skin cancer, melanoma rates in the US alone are about 92K per year, with about 9K deaths per year. Not sure about would wide rates. But overall I'd say that it would be true that sun exposure is responsible for more cancer than other power generation sources.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
I'll believe wind and solar energy can compete with nuclear power when people no longer refer to them as "alternative energy"
What are your thoughts on collected solar power? They are giant mirrors that track the sun to reflect it onto a tower. It heats either water or molten salt, can last overnight. Could that be just 'energy'
Does this technology "work"? If it does then it's "just energy". By "work" I mean it is profitable without a government subsidy or other profit-by-fiat law. By "work" I mean it provides energy when needed.
Given that current solar thermal designs exist largely from government subsidy then it is not just energy. The solar power facility at Ivanpah is an example of something that fails this test. They need gobs of natural gas to preheat the system every morning. If it's a cloudy day then they produce very little power, certainly not much more than if they simply burned that natural gas in a more traditional power plant. I've seen claims of a solar thermal plant that can operate for a few hours after the sun sets, which means it produces no electricity (and therefore no income) for many hours per day.
If you can make a solar power plant that can manage a few cloudy days, the rare solar eclipse, and not need natural gas to keep it all warm, then you will have "just energy".
Nuclear is not renewable because once the fuel is spent, it's gone.
Once a gust of air pushes against a windmill, it never does that again. Once a photon hits a solar cell and causes a current, it's gone.
"Renewable" energy is just another way of saying that we're tapping into an energy gradient so big and long-lasting that it is effectively infinite. Nuclear fusion isn't that much different, even if you just stick with deuterium. Running out of deuterium is further away from today than our pre-human ancestors are. Uranium is tougher, with current systems reserves will last a few hundred years, but with alternate designs current reserves of fissile materials could carry us for tens of thousands of years, which is presumably enough time to get some sort of asteroid mining up and running.
Nuclear fission uses finite sources of energy that run out. Itâ(TM)s not that hard.
Power production is an engineering task. Leave it to the engineers to solve.
Except the engineers never make the big decisions. Their penny-pinching bosses do.
Don't forget that solar panels drain the sun at the same time. Sustainable energy, my ass.
Considering that there is more than enough easily available nuclear fuel to power civilization for several time longer than we have had civilization so far, I give it a pass and in its case consider being truly renewable a distinction without a difference.
> Considering that there is more than enough easily available nuclear fuel to power civilization for several time longer than we have had civilization so far
Show your work.
=Smidge=