I agree they're currently too expensive but these developments are *really* interesting. The nanosolar plant is meant to have a Captial cost of less than $100 million for an annual production of 430 MW (peak). At 20% average availability that works out at $1200 per KW for the initial capital. There is no information about the running costs. Still this is in the ballpark of grid produced electricity. This is just the first plant so in principle there is plenty of head room for further cost reductions.
All in all it will be very interesting to see the quality of the cells these guys produce next year. I notice that they're very cagey of efficiency and price etc. If they're anything like what they claim, they'll have huge margins given the massive world wide market for PV at prices 5-10 times higher than their costs. 400 MW of peak production currently sells for over 2 billion dollars!
With those sort of profits they could easily afford to build new manufacturing capacity from existing cash flow and expand exponentially.
The comparison to a coal power station is misleading. A large coal fired power station can operate for some large fraction of the year at peak power, say 85%, whereas the solar panel only produces peak power during optimum condistions, which doesn't include the night:-)
Generally the best solar sites get 20% availability, so 500 Megawatts of production produces about the same amount of energy as a 100 MegaWatt coal fired power station.
The Kamland experiment, which confirmed neutrino oscillation by detecting the flux of neutrinos from nuclear power stations in Japan is a better detector.
Assuming 4x10^22 neutrinos from decay of short-lived isotopes within 1 second of the explosion, 1000 km to the detector, we can estimate the flux at the kamland detector to be = 3x10^9 neutrinos per square meter per second or 3x10^5 neutrinos per square cm per second.
The reaction used to detect anti-neutrinos is nu + P => nu + e+
The cross section is for this process is approximately 10^-40
kamland is about 2000 tonnes of scintillator so we can estimate the reaction rate to be:
2220 litres a day at 8 cents a litre is very interesting already to many drought striken towns in Australia.
I wish there were more details. How much energy does it use? Is there scope for price reductions? What would the water cost be be if the energy were supplied from the Grid?
You forget the Market's expectation of continued profit growth. For example if they maintain 100% profit growth for 5 years, their yearly income per share will be (4*2.50 = 10.00)*2**5 = $320.00.
In which case your current $385 share is looking like a fantastic investment.
Of course it is very unlikely they will maintain 100% profit growth for 5 years straight but you get the idea.
There have been improvements in safety systems. The Westinghouse AP1000 recently approved by the NRC and proposed for deployment at 5 locations in the States within the next 8 years is projected to be 100 times safer than current reactors (and less than half the price to build).
Regarding waste storage, Yucca is undergoing final review. In the longer term the US proposes to build next generation "burner" reactors to transmute the trans Uranics to shorter-lived waste. Current plans are for prototypes in 2014, commercial deployment in the 2020's.
It remains to be seen if the US can maintain the funding required to see these projects to frution. Long term development projects in the States have to have their funding reviewed every year and there is always some senator with an axe to grind...
The Earth's crust is estimated to contain over 30 trillion tonnes of Uranium. To date we've mined 2 million tonnes of this. That's less than one ten millionth of what we've got (compared to about half of all the conventional Oil).
We've published a study on the web that estimates how much of the remaining Uranium we can effectively extract using current mining and milling technology and current light water reactors by looking at the energy cost of mining vs the energy gain in a reactor.
The answer? Very conservatively, 300 times more than our current 50 year supply of proven reserves.
Oh, fundamentally all the resources we need for human progress can be acquired through energy expenditure. Through mining more dilute ores, recycling current stuff (our civilization turns itself over every 20 years), generating fresh water via desalination, using hydroponics etc etc. If we have enough energy we can acquire everything we need. It's the 2nd law of thermodynamics in action.
Who said it would be too cheap to meter? The point ia that Nuclear technology, like every other technology, has improved over the last 20 years. The abundance of Uranium and Thorium in the Earth's crust is a simple fact. Nuclear Energy in the USA has the second lowest operating cost of any eneergy generation technology.
The Capital cost of modern Nuclear Plant is purported to be half that of plants built in the 1980's.
Don't be deluded yourself.
Check out:
http://www.nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/WebHomeCos tOfNuclearPower
Why do think Tony Blair is risking widespread voter dis-satisfaction and revolt in his own party by re-considering Nuclear Power? Especially in Britain which has about the worst track-record of deploying Nuclear Power of anywhere outside of the old USSR.
Given even current technology, the only limit to Human quality of life is energy. Even water can be produced from seawater via desalination at a cost of around $4 per kilowatt-hours in energy.
The point about Japan just illustrates this. Japan is full of productive people who live full and ineresting lives because they understand and harness technology.
Regarding energy, we've used less than one ten millionth of the Uranium in the Earth's crust even with our current waste reactors that only extract about 1% of the energy in the element. There is more than enough energy in Uranium and Thorium to power a plant wide civilization indefinately ( well millions of years). Renewable energy like wind and solar could also be useful, particularly for Hydrogen generation.
We need to get the costs of a full Hydrogen economy down to the point where the transition from Fossil fuels for transport to Nuclear or renewable generated Hydrogen is a no-brainer. Nuclear appears on track to be cost effective with Fossil fuel electricity in the very near term.
Re:Oh yeah, I've seen predictions like this before
on
No More Next Big Thing?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I suspect that the depletion of fossil fuels will spur the development of Nuclear Fission technology so that energy will be perpetually cheap, at least for the next million or so years on Earth.
I'm not sure what the implications of this will be but I'm betting that the vast differences in Human existence in different nations today will be gone by the end of the 21st century.
We've mined less than one ten millionth of the Uranium on earth. See here and here for the implications.
Under advanced reactors there is a whole lot of stuff about 4th generation reactors. I agree that there are a whole lot of other uses for Nuclear Power but we haven't concentrated them together (they're scattered throughout the site).
Hmm... Good Idea! I'll put in an "Other uses of Nuclear Power" heading.
Nuclear Power emits less Greenhouse Gases than any other form Energy generation including Hydro and Wind. There are far less invisible costs in Nuclear Energy than anything else precisely because it has been so thoroughly studied.
Hi everyone, AbiWord-2.4, due any day now, will come with an integrated version of open-source grammar checker link-grammar. You download a beta version now. As usual it is available for Linux, Macs and Windows.
Regarding water, I was thinking of the modular South African design. I'm less familiar with the Chinese.
3. Most of the moderation is performed by the Carbon within the pebble. The Helium definately plays an additional moderator role.
4. "Without the helium moderator the chain reaction stops"
Later in that paragraph I address the point of heat build up from radioactive fission products.
The point about the PMBR is even with no coolant the high surface area and refactory coating mean that the pebble temperature only rises to 1600 C well short of the 2000 C temperature at which things start to go wrong.
"Do you even know what a moderator is?"
Yes.
In any case, post TMI, Western Reactors have excellent safety records. Next generation PWRs like the AP1000 from Westinghouse have even greater safety margins most of which are passive.
I'm quite comfortable that provided the correct Safety Culture is maintained Nuclear Power reactors are safe and reliable.
1. It's not the graphite that burned in Chernbyl. It's pyrolitic graphite that fits over the nose-cones of re-entry vehicals. The stuff is much less likely to burn than diamond.
2. There is no water in the system at any point. The Helium directly drives a gas turbine.
3. The pyrolitic graphite is only one of seven layers of contianment around the fuel.
4. Without the Helium moderator the chain reaction stops. The Fission product heat stablizes *well* below any temperature that can damage the pebble and drops rapidly there-after.
5. Gas moderated reactors are a means to make Thorium breeders. However these make no economic sense while the price of Uranium is so low.
That said I'm all for investigating interesting reactor alternatives.
Dammit you Americans always use the stupidist units.
There is about 1 KW of radiant energy that falls on a square meter of ground on a bright sunny day.
So given that this thing covers 18.2x10^6 square meters there is 18.2 GW of sunlight intercepted by this area.
Given that this thing produces 0.5 GW of power it's around 2.7 % efficient at turning land area into electricty.
I need some links to determine the total efficiency of the system but it appears that these things are placed a reasonable distance apart. I imagine that since they're placed above ground and track the sun, (so their shadows move on the ground, that the environmental impact may not be too big.
This system will no doubt be a useful addition to the electricty GRID but the GRID still needs base-load generators to cover night and cloudy days.
Slashdot Mirror
Click on the link at the end of TFA and you'll see the real scientific paper on which this was based.
1 7.pdf
Lots of nice graphs at the end of it.
All based on 18O/16O ratios
It's all here on the archive in glorious pdf-ed Latex.
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/0701/07011
Hi Guys,
The "floppy disk" icon has been changed in the latest build to a much prettier and larger tango icon.
The word processor activity will continue to evolve. Our latest code has the AbiWord canvas widget embedded in python.
We can make the interface exactly what is wanted with that. Customization per country is also easy.
Martin Sevior
AbiWord core hacker
I'm Hacking on AbiWord to the needs of the OLPC project.
I agree they're currently too expensive but these developments are *really* interesting. The nanosolar plant is meant to have a Captial cost of less than $100 million for an annual production of 430 MW (peak). At 20% average availability that works out at $1200 per KW for the initial capital. There is no information about the running costs. Still this is in the ballpark of grid produced electricity. This is just the first plant so in principle there is plenty of head room for further cost reductions.
All in all it will be very interesting to see the quality of the cells these guys produce next year. I notice that they're very cagey of efficiency and price etc. If they're anything like what they claim, they'll have huge margins given the massive world wide market for PV at prices 5-10 times higher than their costs. 400 MW of peak production currently sells for over 2 billion dollars!
With those sort of profits they could easily afford to build new manufacturing capacity from existing cash flow and expand exponentially.
All in all, watch this space in 2007.
The comparison to a coal power station is misleading. A large coal fired power station can operate for some large fraction of the year at peak power, say 85%, whereas the solar panel only produces peak power during optimum condistions, which doesn't include the night :-)
Generally the best solar sites get 20% availability, so 500 Megawatts of production produces about the same amount of energy as a 100 MegaWatt coal fired power station.
Damn! A few corrections.
The reaction is: anti-nu + proton => neutron + e+
The cross section is for this process is approximately 10^-40 square centimeters
The Kamland experiment, which confirmed neutrino oscillation by detecting the flux of neutrinos from nuclear power stations in Japan is a better detector.
Assuming 4x10^22 neutrinos from decay of short-lived isotopes within 1 second of the explosion, 1000 km to the detector, we can estimate the flux at the kamland detector to be = 3x10^9 neutrinos per square meter per second or 3x10^5 neutrinos per square cm per second.
The reaction used to detect anti-neutrinos is nu + P => nu + e+
The cross section is for this process is approximately 10^-40
kamland is about 2000 tonnes of scintillator so we can estimate the reaction rate to be:
5x10^5 * 10^-40 * 2x10^9 * 6x10^23/12 = 0.005 interactions
The factor 12 takes account of the mass in carbon nuclei, the 6x10^23 is avagadro's number.
So the explosion would not even show up in Kamland.
2220 litres a day at 8 cents a litre is very interesting already to many drought striken towns in Australia.
I wish there were more details. How much energy does it use? Is there scope for price reductions? What would the water cost be be if the energy were supplied from the Grid?
Wow. You just beautifully made the parent posters point.
You forget the Market's expectation of continued profit growth. For example if they maintain 100% profit growth for 5 years, their yearly income per share will be (4*2.50 = 10.00)*2**5 = $320.00.
In which case your current $385 share is looking like a fantastic investment.
Of course it is very unlikely they will maintain 100% profit growth for 5 years straight but you get the idea.
There have been improvements in safety systems. The Westinghouse AP1000 recently approved by the NRC and proposed for deployment at 5 locations in the States within the next 8 years is projected to be 100 times safer than current reactors (and less than half the price to build).
c identsAtNuclearPowerPlants
s tOfNuclearPower
See:
http://www.nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/WebHomeAc
and
http://www.nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/WebHomeCo
Regarding waste storage, Yucca is undergoing final review. In the longer term the US proposes to build next generation "burner" reactors to transmute the trans Uranics to shorter-lived waste. Current plans are for prototypes in 2014, commercial deployment in the 2020's.
It remains to be seen if the US can maintain the funding required to see these projects to frution. Long term development projects in the States have to have their funding reviewed every year and there is always some senator with an axe to grind...
Anyway, see:
http://www.gnep.energy.gov/
The Earth's crust is estimated to contain over 30 trillion tonnes of Uranium. To date we've mined 2 million tonnes of this. That's less than one ten millionth of what we've got (compared to about half of all the conventional Oil).
e rgyLifecycleOfNuclear_Power
We've published a study on the web that estimates how much of the remaining Uranium we can effectively extract using current mining and milling technology and current light water reactors by looking at the energy cost of mining vs the energy gain in a reactor.
The answer? Very conservatively, 300 times more than our current 50 year supply of proven reserves.
It all here: http://www.nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/WebHomeEn
Oh, fundamentally all the resources we need for human progress can be acquired through energy expenditure. Through mining more dilute ores, recycling current stuff (our civilization turns itself over every 20 years), generating fresh water via desalination, using hydroponics etc etc. If we have enough energy we can acquire everything we need. It's the 2nd law of thermodynamics in action.
Who said it would be too cheap to meter? The point ia that Nuclear technology, like every other technology, has improved over the last 20 years. The abundance of Uranium and Thorium in the Earth's crust is a simple fact. Nuclear Energy in the USA has the second lowest operating cost of any eneergy generation technology. The Capital cost of modern Nuclear Plant is purported to be half that of plants built in the 1980's. Don't be deluded yourself. Check out: http://www.nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/WebHomeCos tOfNuclearPower
Why do think Tony Blair is risking widespread voter dis-satisfaction and revolt in his own party by re-considering Nuclear Power? Especially in Britain which has about the worst track-record of deploying Nuclear Power of anywhere outside of the old USSR.
Given even current technology, the only limit to Human quality of life is energy. Even water can be produced from seawater via desalination at a cost of around $4 per kilowatt-hours in energy.
The point about Japan just illustrates this. Japan is full of productive people who live full and ineresting lives because they understand and harness technology.
Regarding energy, we've used less than one ten millionth of the Uranium in the Earth's crust even with our current waste reactors that only extract about 1% of the energy in the element. There is more than enough energy in Uranium and Thorium to power a plant wide civilization indefinately ( well millions of years). Renewable energy like wind and solar could also be useful, particularly for Hydrogen generation.
We need to get the costs of a full Hydrogen economy down to the point where the transition from Fossil fuels for transport to Nuclear or renewable generated Hydrogen is a no-brainer. Nuclear appears on track to be cost effective with Fossil fuel electricity in the very near term.
I suspect that the depletion of fossil fuels will spur the development of Nuclear Fission technology so that energy will be perpetually cheap, at least for the next million or so years on Earth.
I'm not sure what the implications of this will be but I'm betting that the vast differences in Human existence in different nations today will be gone by the end of the 21st century.
We've mined less than one ten millionth of the Uranium on earth. See here and here for the implications.
Geeze...
It's far easier and cheaper just to build new Nuclear Reactors. The technology works. It's available now. We should just do it.
See:
http://nuclearinfo.net/
Look Harder :-)
Under advanced reactors there is a whole lot of stuff about 4th generation reactors. I agree that there are a whole lot of other uses for Nuclear Power but we haven't concentrated them together (they're scattered throughout the site).
Hmm... Good Idea! I'll put in an "Other uses of Nuclear Power" heading.
Thanks!
Grrr I can't stand it any longer.
e _Emissions_of_Nuclear_Power
We're still constructing the site but here it is anyway...
http://nuclearinfo.net/
That German Green person is way out to lunch. We prove it on the site. Scroll down to:
(There is some bug in our twiki that prevents direct links..)
http://www.nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower#Greenhous
Nuclear Power emits less Greenhouse Gases than any other form Energy generation including Hydro and Wind. There are far less invisible costs in Nuclear Energy than anything else precisely because it has been so thoroughly studied.
Geeze 100 paid developers....
If AbiWord/Gnumeric had that we would have beat the pants off MS ages ago.
*sigh*
Hi everyone, AbiWord-2.4, due any day now, will come with an integrated version of open-source grammar checker link-grammar. You download a beta version now. As usual it is available for Linux, Macs and Windows.
Regarding water, I was thinking of the modular South African design. I'm less familiar with the Chinese.
3. Most of the moderation is performed by the Carbon within the pebble. The Helium definately plays an additional moderator role.
4. "Without the helium moderator the chain reaction stops"
Later in that paragraph I address the point of heat build up from radioactive fission products.
The point about the PMBR is even with no coolant the high surface area and refactory coating mean that the pebble temperature only rises to 1600 C well short of the 2000 C temperature at which things start to go wrong.
"Do you even know what a moderator is?"
Yes.
In any case, post TMI, Western Reactors have excellent safety records. Next generation PWRs like the AP1000 from Westinghouse have even greater safety margins most of which are passive.
I'm quite comfortable that provided the correct Safety Culture is maintained Nuclear Power reactors are safe and reliable.
Just to set the record straight about PBMRs.
1. It's not the graphite that burned in Chernbyl. It's pyrolitic graphite that fits over the nose-cones of re-entry vehicals. The stuff is much less likely to burn than diamond.
2. There is no water in the system at any point. The Helium directly drives a gas turbine.
3. The pyrolitic graphite is only one of seven layers of contianment around the fuel.
4. Without the Helium moderator the chain reaction stops. The Fission product heat stablizes *well* below any temperature that can damage the pebble and drops rapidly there-after.
5. Gas moderated reactors are a means to make Thorium breeders. However these make no economic sense while the price of Uranium is so low.
That said I'm all for investigating interesting reactor alternatives.
Dammit you Americans always use the stupidist units.
There is about 1 KW of radiant energy that falls on a square meter of ground on a bright sunny day.
So given that this thing covers 18.2x10^6 square meters there is 18.2 GW of sunlight intercepted by this area.
Given that this thing produces 0.5 GW of power it's around 2.7 % efficient at turning land area into electricty.
I need some links to determine the total efficiency of the system but it appears that these things are placed a reasonable distance apart.
I imagine that since they're placed above ground and track the sun, (so their shadows move on the ground, that the environmental impact may not be too big.
This system will no doubt be a useful addition to the electricty GRID but the GRID still needs base-load generators to cover night and cloudy days.