Yes it is. Small old nuclear reactors gets retired. New ones are built. (Just not in the US.)
WNA nuclear reactor database lists 131 retired nuclear reactors with an average capacity of 316 MW and an average start year of 1969. It also lists 435 operating reactors with an average capacity of 842 MW and an average start year of 1985.
The reactors shut down this side of the year 2000 is 12 british reactors from the 60-ies and earlier, one French and one German reactor from the early 70-ies, famously the Fukushima reactors and their Hamaoka brothers from the 70-ies, and a number of eastern bloc reactors of which some are newer but of inferior Soviet design.
Sorry, but you are being nonsensical. Breeders such as Superphoenix produce about as much fission products as any other reactor of similar size. It needs to fission just about the same amount of heavy isotopes to get just about the same thermal output. The difference is that the breeder utilizes close to 100% of the mined uranium/thorium, whereas the current once-through designs use about 1% and leave the rest as waste.
The reason Superpheonix was difficult was not because it produced more radioactive fission products, because it didn't. It was because it was first-of-a-kind and used sodium as coolant. Sure, reprocessing equipment and chemicals gets contaminated and that means a bit more of that kind of waste, but that is also of a more benign type that does not need storage forever. You do get rid of mining and of spent-fuel waste that requires deep geological repositories.
Sorry, it is not a misconception, but a widely accepted fact. Pumped hydro is all well and good, but just as hydro in general it is limited by geography. You need (to be able to create) a reservoir on a height, and need a reservoir below that to pump from.
The UK averages 42 GW electricity, so to cover that with wind, you'd need on the order of 150 GW wind turbines, 120 GW of pumping capacity, 60 GW pumped hydro turbines, and 40 TWh storage capacity in the dams. This is about three "Three Gorges" projects, plus pumps. Three Gorges is an enormous project that displaced more than a million. AFAIK, you don't have the geography for this.
Btw, the Dinorwig has 1.5% of the generating capacity I ask for, but has only a storage capacity for 6h of production, whereas I think you'd need two weeks or 56 times more, so it only has 1.5/56 = 0.027% of needed storage capacity. So you need to scale up Dinorwig by a factor of 3700.
As I said, wind could dominate if it could produce baseload power. It can't, so it has very limited applicability. It is, in essence, a way to extend hydro and natural gas (that you don't need for peaking) by 40% or something like that. Therefore, wind power cements gas power and thus CO2 emissions. If you build a wind tower, you'll need twice the corresponding energy from natural gas for 20 years.
Fukushima did shut down when the quake hit. The core melted anyway, due to heat from spontaneous decay of fission products. It's hard to avoid this - whatever fission tech you employ, the fission process produce short-lived isotopes that decays and thus produce heat. The key in gen3 plants is passive cooling, that works by gravity and convection.
Yes, the market works extremely well, and when external costs are internalized, the market will optimize that too.
Asynchronous factories sounds like a really bad idea - that will waste enormous resources. Extra wear and tear on machinery, warm-up-costs, idling costs for machines and labour, extra production lines to be able to make up for lost production during lulls and so on. But IF it is a good idea, then the invisible hand will do it if external costs are internalized.
Sorry, but the "cooperating on making the earth unlivable" and saying that China is about "slavery" is not only stupid, it is anti-civilisatory and downright evil. Free trade has been lifting hundreds of million Chinese from absolute poverty into a decent middle-class life. This is absolutely the fastest way to a modern life and the fastest way past the most polluting phase of industrialism and into the service economy. Also, it benefits poor Americans and Europeans alike. However, the US and EU could and should have paved the way with more nuclear power and technology. China now has to do much of the work themselves, and bridge with coal.
No, there is definitely not any storage tech that is feasible to fix the intermittency. Flywheels? So, we should add some 50,000 tonnes of flywheels to each wind turbine to ensure two weeks of storage?
You are utterly against reactors that do not fail safely? There is no such thing as absolute safety and it is beyond me why anybody should ask for it. It should suffice that nuclear, on average, does little harm per TWh.
Bioregionalism? Me, I reject any solution that is not based on monetizing environmental costs and then letting the market do its thing. The answer to our problems is NOT about being less efficient or putting up artificial barriers to cooperation.
You're an American, right? Most Americans seem to ignore the rest of the world... Problem is, for the most part, coal and oil use is about quite basic necessities and basic civilisation. It may be called "greed" for a chindian to want a nice house, 24/7 electricity, a productive job and a modern life for himself and his family, but I would rather frame such ambitions in a bit more positive light. Making rich people poor and making it harder for corporations or limiting US urban sprawl may make a small dent in the rising curve of global CO2 emissions, and it might give us two years extra before climate tipping points hit us, but not more. Limiting international trade is just madness, btw - trade is the most civilisatory force in the world.
What we need is not wind or solar, those are just coal's alibies and, as such, they make matters worse, not better. Intermittent sources won't cut it. We need a rush to nuclear power, we need better battery tech and we need national carbon taxes with a globally agreed floor. If not, global CO2 emissions will just keep on rising whatever we do.
Denmark alone has 4 GW. Scale that up to global land size, and you have 14 TW. And Denmark is by no means fully utilized - it has somewhat old, small turbines and lots of windy areas left, and, of course, quite a bit of off-shore potential. AFAIK, this report is the most comprehensive study yet, and it reports 72 GW as the global potential.
Also, while you average only a third of nameplate capacity from wind, electricity is worth three times as much as thermal energy, so that evens out. (The 13.5 TW you claim is all primary energy, which means nuclear is counted three times the size of hydro, which generates just as much electricity. To replace those 13.5 TW primary energy, 4.5 TW average electrical generation should suffice.)
Space isn't the problem. Intermittency is. The world could aim for 80% wind power if wind towers produced baseload power, or 100% if it were dispatchable. However, wind is very intermittent, and thus cannot be integrated above approximately 20%. You could try to extend this by smart grids, more wide-spread grids, demand-side-management and so on, but you won't get very far.
That would actually work well, although no politician or even researcher would dare say it, as it sounds "irresponsible". If you'd drop canisters of spent nuclear fuel in deep ocean, they would be covered by some mud and nothing would ever happen.
You present FUD, and your name explains why. Thorium is so abundant, and the molten salt reactor need so little, that fuel availability will be no problem. And if you worry anyway, you can always buy 60 tonnes ($600,000 would be a reasonable price if thorium mining scales up) before you build the reactor. It needs one tonne per gigawatt-year, so that 60 tonnes would last the life-time of the reactor. Also, the liquid salt research reactors has worked very well. You do need to do some design and prototyping for a commercial reactor, though. The Chinese have started to do just that.
Many seems to consider grid parity to be kind of reaching nirvana. To me, it is the point where suboptimizations set in for real. A rational government would, for instance, lower taxes on electricity to postpone grid parity. Otherwise, home owners would sink 0.2E, all of which would be gone, into PV instead of electricity companies sinking 0.06E into wind, with 0.1E in taxes to use by the government for health care, pensions and stuff, and 0.04E to misc stuff such as ensuring a good grid.
I would definitely not be so sure about increasing electricity prices, btw. As I said, 0.2E seems extreme and way above any reasonable free market equilibrium. Such a high price must depend on high taxes and barriers to new production - that is, they are propped up by politics. Also, consider that if your high expectations on PV proves correct, that would, along with hourly pricing, result in lower electricity prices during the day, which will lower your profits. Also, more wind, shale gas, Saharan concentrated solar or the unlikely nuclear renaissance could all lower prices quite a bit.
Your figures seems reasonable, but I wonder if you omitted labor costs for installation. Also, you seem to disregard any maintenance costs, as well as the system aging and having a reduced production of around 1% per year. If you factor those in, and also the reduced worth of your system as it ages, I think you'll find that this investment can never, unsubsidised, compete even with inflation, much less with a mortage reduction. If it can't compete with inflation, it is losing money. Btw, I'm surprised to hear about your extreme electricity prices, which certainly help your calculation a lot. You pay some three times the price of the levelized cost of wind.
I doubt that it is cost effective even in NL without subsidies. Also, I suspect that you disregard interest. If you disagree, please provide a back-of-envelope calculation on how you reach break-even in 12 years.
It's not high quality jobs. More money (for the same production) means more labor, that is, lowered productivity, i.e. low quality jobs. That doesn't mean those particular jobs are badly paid or anything like that, of course, as subsidies can create wealth in a sector. But overall and on average, that nation's wages and GDP will be lower as these jobs are forced upon us.
"Renewable" is simply not a useful term. Renewable electrons doesn't have better characteristics. Renewable sources aren't guaranteed to be less environmentally damaging, nor cheaper.
It seems your reading comprehension is not very good. The documents prove what I say - Germany is net importing from France. I have not said a single thing about Germany's net towards other countries.
"What is that supposed to mean" is too vague a question. I think I was clear. If it's the English that's the problem, try babelfish or something to get it in German.
Repetition doesn't make what you say anymore true. You may look at exchange graphs here:
https://www.entsoe.eu/resources/publications/former-associations/ucte/graphical-statistics/exchange-data/
France is consistently net exporting to Germany, by a very wide margin. ("Transit" is not a very meaningful term when it comes to electricity.)
Also, the more renewables you try to add, the more you'll export. Cheaply, below total production costs. And the more fossil production you'll lock in to try to balance the intermittent sources.
Markets are imperfect. We should use markets. The same with nuclear. The benefits greatly outweighs the harm.
Nuclear accidents are seen as unacceptable, and many think nuclear safety has to be 100%. It isn't so. Nothing is safe - so we just need to make sure risk/rewards are better than for alternatives. Some internalization of external costs may be in order. A carbon tax, a nuclear safety tax differentiated on probabilistic failure calculations and so on.
China has started an LFTR program and has a very active breeder program, as well as an aggressive program to clear IP rights of western LWR designs in their own varieties. If you hear a giant sucking sound somewhere around 2020, it might be the entire multi-trillion dollar energy market moving east.
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Yes it is. Small old nuclear reactors gets retired. New ones are built. (Just not in the US.)
WNA nuclear reactor database lists 131 retired nuclear reactors with an average capacity of 316 MW and an average start year of 1969. It also lists 435 operating reactors with an average capacity of 842 MW and an average start year of 1985. The reactors shut down this side of the year 2000 is 12 british reactors from the 60-ies and earlier, one French and one German reactor from the early 70-ies, famously the Fukushima reactors and their Hamaoka brothers from the 70-ies, and a number of eastern bloc reactors of which some are newer but of inferior Soviet design.
Sorry, but you are being nonsensical. Breeders such as Superphoenix produce about as much fission products as any other reactor of similar size. It needs to fission just about the same amount of heavy isotopes to get just about the same thermal output. The difference is that the breeder utilizes close to 100% of the mined uranium/thorium, whereas the current once-through designs use about 1% and leave the rest as waste. The reason Superpheonix was difficult was not because it produced more radioactive fission products, because it didn't. It was because it was first-of-a-kind and used sodium as coolant. Sure, reprocessing equipment and chemicals gets contaminated and that means a bit more of that kind of waste, but that is also of a more benign type that does not need storage forever. You do get rid of mining and of spent-fuel waste that requires deep geological repositories.
I assume you would also accept to have electricy 30-50% of the time, and that the electricity you do get comes at a hefty price premium?
Sorry, it is not a misconception, but a widely accepted fact. Pumped hydro is all well and good, but just as hydro in general it is limited by geography. You need (to be able to create) a reservoir on a height, and need a reservoir below that to pump from.
The UK averages 42 GW electricity, so to cover that with wind, you'd need on the order of 150 GW wind turbines, 120 GW of pumping capacity, 60 GW pumped hydro turbines, and 40 TWh storage capacity in the dams. This is about three "Three Gorges" projects, plus pumps. Three Gorges is an enormous project that displaced more than a million. AFAIK, you don't have the geography for this.
Btw, the Dinorwig has 1.5% of the generating capacity I ask for, but has only a storage capacity for 6h of production, whereas I think you'd need two weeks or 56 times more, so it only has 1.5/56 = 0.027% of needed storage capacity. So you need to scale up Dinorwig by a factor of 3700.
As I said, wind could dominate if it could produce baseload power. It can't, so it has very limited applicability. It is, in essence, a way to extend hydro and natural gas (that you don't need for peaking) by 40% or something like that. Therefore, wind power cements gas power and thus CO2 emissions. If you build a wind tower, you'll need twice the corresponding energy from natural gas for 20 years.
Fukushima did shut down when the quake hit. The core melted anyway, due to heat from spontaneous decay of fission products. It's hard to avoid this - whatever fission tech you employ, the fission process produce short-lived isotopes that decays and thus produce heat. The key in gen3 plants is passive cooling, that works by gravity and convection.
Yes, the market works extremely well, and when external costs are internalized, the market will optimize that too.
Asynchronous factories sounds like a really bad idea - that will waste enormous resources. Extra wear and tear on machinery, warm-up-costs, idling costs for machines and labour, extra production lines to be able to make up for lost production during lulls and so on. But IF it is a good idea, then the invisible hand will do it if external costs are internalized.
Sorry, but the "cooperating on making the earth unlivable" and saying that China is about "slavery" is not only stupid, it is anti-civilisatory and downright evil. Free trade has been lifting hundreds of million Chinese from absolute poverty into a decent middle-class life. This is absolutely the fastest way to a modern life and the fastest way past the most polluting phase of industrialism and into the service economy. Also, it benefits poor Americans and Europeans alike. However, the US and EU could and should have paved the way with more nuclear power and technology. China now has to do much of the work themselves, and bridge with coal.
No, there is definitely not any storage tech that is feasible to fix the intermittency. Flywheels? So, we should add some 50,000 tonnes of flywheels to each wind turbine to ensure two weeks of storage? You are utterly against reactors that do not fail safely? There is no such thing as absolute safety and it is beyond me why anybody should ask for it. It should suffice that nuclear, on average, does little harm per TWh. Bioregionalism? Me, I reject any solution that is not based on monetizing environmental costs and then letting the market do its thing. The answer to our problems is NOT about being less efficient or putting up artificial barriers to cooperation.
You're an American, right? Most Americans seem to ignore the rest of the world... Problem is, for the most part, coal and oil use is about quite basic necessities and basic civilisation. It may be called "greed" for a chindian to want a nice house, 24/7 electricity, a productive job and a modern life for himself and his family, but I would rather frame such ambitions in a bit more positive light. Making rich people poor and making it harder for corporations or limiting US urban sprawl may make a small dent in the rising curve of global CO2 emissions, and it might give us two years extra before climate tipping points hit us, but not more. Limiting international trade is just madness, btw - trade is the most civilisatory force in the world. What we need is not wind or solar, those are just coal's alibies and, as such, they make matters worse, not better. Intermittent sources won't cut it. We need a rush to nuclear power, we need better battery tech and we need national carbon taxes with a globally agreed floor. If not, global CO2 emissions will just keep on rising whatever we do.
Except for Jevons paradox. Increase the efficiency and you may find the resource use will increase.
Denmark alone has 4 GW. Scale that up to global land size, and you have 14 TW. And Denmark is by no means fully utilized - it has somewhat old, small turbines and lots of windy areas left, and, of course, quite a bit of off-shore potential. AFAIK, this report is the most comprehensive study yet, and it reports 72 GW as the global potential. Also, while you average only a third of nameplate capacity from wind, electricity is worth three times as much as thermal energy, so that evens out. (The 13.5 TW you claim is all primary energy, which means nuclear is counted three times the size of hydro, which generates just as much electricity. To replace those 13.5 TW primary energy, 4.5 TW average electrical generation should suffice.)
Not very stupid at all, as you don't get high enough temperatures for graphite to burn. But there is also graphite free MSR designs.
Space isn't the problem. Intermittency is. The world could aim for 80% wind power if wind towers produced baseload power, or 100% if it were dispatchable. However, wind is very intermittent, and thus cannot be integrated above approximately 20%. You could try to extend this by smart grids, more wide-spread grids, demand-side-management and so on, but you won't get very far.
Are you confusing molten salt reactors with metal-cooled (sodium) reactors? Not the same thing at all.
The current idea that each country should take care of its own nuclear waste is, quite frankly, idiotic.
What about fission products? Technetium-99, for example, or zirconium-93?
That would actually work well, although no politician or even researcher would dare say it, as it sounds "irresponsible". If you'd drop canisters of spent nuclear fuel in deep ocean, they would be covered by some mud and nothing would ever happen.
You present FUD, and your name explains why. Thorium is so abundant, and the molten salt reactor need so little, that fuel availability will be no problem. And if you worry anyway, you can always buy 60 tonnes ($600,000 would be a reasonable price if thorium mining scales up) before you build the reactor. It needs one tonne per gigawatt-year, so that 60 tonnes would last the life-time of the reactor. Also, the liquid salt research reactors has worked very well. You do need to do some design and prototyping for a commercial reactor, though. The Chinese have started to do just that.
Many seems to consider grid parity to be kind of reaching nirvana. To me, it is the point where suboptimizations set in for real. A rational government would, for instance, lower taxes on electricity to postpone grid parity. Otherwise, home owners would sink 0.2E, all of which would be gone, into PV instead of electricity companies sinking 0.06E into wind, with 0.1E in taxes to use by the government for health care, pensions and stuff, and 0.04E to misc stuff such as ensuring a good grid. I would definitely not be so sure about increasing electricity prices, btw. As I said, 0.2E seems extreme and way above any reasonable free market equilibrium. Such a high price must depend on high taxes and barriers to new production - that is, they are propped up by politics. Also, consider that if your high expectations on PV proves correct, that would, along with hourly pricing, result in lower electricity prices during the day, which will lower your profits. Also, more wind, shale gas, Saharan concentrated solar or the unlikely nuclear renaissance could all lower prices quite a bit.
Your figures seems reasonable, but I wonder if you omitted labor costs for installation. Also, you seem to disregard any maintenance costs, as well as the system aging and having a reduced production of around 1% per year. If you factor those in, and also the reduced worth of your system as it ages, I think you'll find that this investment can never, unsubsidised, compete even with inflation, much less with a mortage reduction. If it can't compete with inflation, it is losing money. Btw, I'm surprised to hear about your extreme electricity prices, which certainly help your calculation a lot. You pay some three times the price of the levelized cost of wind.
I doubt that it is cost effective even in NL without subsidies. Also, I suspect that you disregard interest. If you disagree, please provide a back-of-envelope calculation on how you reach break-even in 12 years.
It's not high quality jobs. More money (for the same production) means more labor, that is, lowered productivity, i.e. low quality jobs. That doesn't mean those particular jobs are badly paid or anything like that, of course, as subsidies can create wealth in a sector. But overall and on average, that nation's wages and GDP will be lower as these jobs are forced upon us. "Renewable" is simply not a useful term. Renewable electrons doesn't have better characteristics. Renewable sources aren't guaranteed to be less environmentally damaging, nor cheaper.
It seems your reading comprehension is not very good. The documents prove what I say - Germany is net importing from France. I have not said a single thing about Germany's net towards other countries. "What is that supposed to mean" is too vague a question. I think I was clear. If it's the English that's the problem, try babelfish or something to get it in German.
Repetition doesn't make what you say anymore true. You may look at exchange graphs here: https://www.entsoe.eu/resources/publications/former-associations/ucte/graphical-statistics/exchange-data/ France is consistently net exporting to Germany, by a very wide margin. ("Transit" is not a very meaningful term when it comes to electricity.) Also, the more renewables you try to add, the more you'll export. Cheaply, below total production costs. And the more fossil production you'll lock in to try to balance the intermittent sources.
... in the US.
Markets are imperfect. We should use markets. The same with nuclear. The benefits greatly outweighs the harm. Nuclear accidents are seen as unacceptable, and many think nuclear safety has to be 100%. It isn't so. Nothing is safe - so we just need to make sure risk/rewards are better than for alternatives. Some internalization of external costs may be in order. A carbon tax, a nuclear safety tax differentiated on probabilistic failure calculations and so on.
China has started an LFTR program and has a very active breeder program, as well as an aggressive program to clear IP rights of western LWR designs in their own varieties. If you hear a giant sucking sound somewhere around 2020, it might be the entire multi-trillion dollar energy market moving east.