Coal kills hundreds of thousands yearly. Any normally operating coal power plant (and the mine its supplied from) is a constantly occurring environmental disaster. A Chernobyl type accident won't happen again, ever. The reactor had no secondary containment vessel, if it had one, it would have been much like three mile island. The reactor would have been a total loss, but there would have been no deaths, maybe a few cancers. Even then, if you consider every mutation, every cancer as a death, Chernobyl is about the same monthly worldwide deaths from coal ! Stop cherry picking what you don't like about Nuclear and ignoring the rest. Even natural gas mining and distribution kills hundreds yearly. As well as oil exploration.
France has zero operational fast breeders. Phenix was shutdown in 2009 and Superphenix in 1998. The first little one was shutdown decades ago. As for France nuclear load following, there are many sources that state that. Even 5% steps every 2 or 3 minutes is good enough. Hydro can do better minute by minute load following. But the sources claim 5% every 1 minute. Anyhow, nuclear total fuel cost is 15%, so load following doesn't same much cost, and doesn't produce extra CO2, so they can afford to let it overproduce a little more electricity than other countries might. 15 years for a nuclear plant is the result of nuclear over regulation. With some sanity this period should be less than 10 years. Big hydro takes just as long. France total generating capacity (end 2011) is 126 GWe, including 25 GWe hydro, 28 GWe fossil fuel, 6.6 GWe wind and 2.2 GWe solar PV. Peak demand is about 100 GWe. In 2012 gross production was 425 billion kWh from nuclear, 62.5 from hydro, 22.5 from coal, 20.5 from natural gas, 19.5 from solar and wind, and 7.5 from biofuels & waste, of total 561 billion kWh. With about 93% from clean sources, I would contend they will do far more good by electrifying their car fleet than trying to reduce their CO2 emissions from electricity further. Shuting down a nuclear reactor only makes sense if it's at end of life, and can't be extended. Most nuclear costs are until start of operations. I know how a grid works. I know that due to Germany dense population you can afford to have a strong grid. But still, you need about 6GW worth of name plate capacity in solar panels and wind turbines to make up to a 1GWe nuclear plant. Assuming 4GW of wind and 2GW of Solar PV, just the wind part costs as much as the nuke. If your plan was economical, your electricity would be cheaper than France.
A quote about Germany's plan: The cost of replacing nuclear power with renewables is estimated by the government to amount to some EUR 1000 billion. One trillion EUR. Even assuming an exorbitant EUR 10 billion per nuke, you can build 100GWe with that money, enough to provide 130% of your electricity from nukes alone. Even if it's EUR 500 billion, it would still be enough to replace all old nukes plus fossil fuels. Actual nuke costs is less than EUR 5 billion per GWe. Long term more and more electricity will be required to recharge EVs overnight, so long term less load following should be needed. And the pumped hydro is the only truly sensible part of the current plan.
GE, Westinghouse, Areva, Hitachi, Siements don't care about the environment, climate change or whatever, they care about profits. That's right, they don't care for Thorium fluid reactors cause there's no fuel fabrication profits.
My weird idea came from Alvin Weinberg (one of the Manhattan project scientists, credited with the invention of the light water nuclear reactor), and a nuclear engineering PhD named Kirk Sorensen (the 100 page essay is his PhD dissertation). So it's mostly an american idea. Except that the Chinese are doing it too. As well as the Czecs. So are the French. Humm so are the Indians. All of them are fluid fuel reactors (most salts, but some molten metal as coolant, with Thorium fuel).The main advantage is having a fluid fuel/coolant thorium reactor.
I wouldn't call the German plan retarded, just way too expensive. Just too slow to implement completely. Just something that will eventually be shown to be bad economics.
Solar, wind and pumped hydro is expensive, I just showed you the facts from our electricity bill comparison, however you're still in the fantasy the Germans have an economical plan. Solar PV produces less than 10% of electricity in the winter than in the summer, 1/10th ! Wind is extremely finicky, wind turbine output until 45Km/h winds is proportional to wind speed cubed, so if 45Km/h is full power, 20Km/h 10% power ! And just a drop from 45Km/h to 35Km/h looses half the power ! Hence all the pumped hydro because you can't produce solar and wind when you need, you must store it using expensive methods.
Nuclear just keeps humming. And French nuclear reactors can go from 30% to 100% power in 5% per minute adjustments. The problem isn't the tech, it's the lack of vision and lack of interest in making it work.
No it's not technologically challenging, compared to how hard it was to perfect light water reactors. MSR reactors weren't built because they aren't well suited for submarines, and light water nuclear reactors are perfect for subs, but far from ideal for earth bound utilization. Nuclear ships need very little nuclear power (like 5% of a large civilian nuclear reactor, so nuclear fuel lasts a long time in submarine reactors anyhow, LFTR fuel efficiency doesn't matter for subs), even an aircraft carrier needs much less than your typical 1GWe civilian reactor. The main argument the greens got right is nuclear research was driven by military needs. Then it was minimally adapted to civilian usage. 100% the truth. A very ugly truth. I just read a 100 page essay on the Manhattan Project (with the raw original journals from the scientists in the end), and it's dam clear that until 1950 the heat produced by nuclear reactors were considered mostly an extremely undesirable side effect on the quest for plutonium for nuclear weapons. And that Thorium (and molten salt reactors) were never seriously experimented with because Thorium couldn't breed more U-233 than it consumed with 1940s nuclear tech, while U-235 could breed Plutonium easily since U-235 was fissile, while Thorium is fertile (like U-238). And the only U-233 nuclear bomb tested under performed (there are no U-233 in any known nuclear bomb arsenal in the world). The reason we got civilian nuclear reactors was admiral Rickover and his desire to have nuclear powered subs. Total investment in thorium molten salt reactors was like a few million USD / year until the program was cancelled in 1971 compared to many hundreds millions USD / year for uranium / plutonium fast breeders. Like at least 90 times more money going into fast breeders. Yet, molten salt reactors demonstrated 22 thousand hours of problem free operation, while fast breeders kept overrunning their budget, until president Clinton killed fast breeder research. It was a matter of politics and military interests, not of technical challenges. Big oil as a big hand on this whole story too.
I know exactly what LNT means. And it's BS. Search hormesis in youtube, and you'll find a few medical PhDs defending it.
If the max recommended exposure of 1 mSv/year was anything credible, Guarapari would have very elevated cancer levels, off the scale. The workers in a nuclear power plant that get the most radiation get a tiny fraction of what Guarapari inhabitants get.
I didn't say 1% out of one million people get more cancer than usual in Guarapari, quite the opposite. A typical quote is 30% of us will get cancer over our lifetimes. So people in my mom's age range of 65 (and their same aged friends) should already have around 10% cancer incidence, and we're seeing one order of magnitude less. And it's not just the monazitic sand radiation, there's also very strong sun radiation as well.
Please lookup radiation from ground radon as well. Most radiation we get is actually from Radon (resulting from decay of Thorium and Uranium in the earth's core).
Water cooled nuclear plants operate at 350C, 20C difference in cooling water reduce the thermal cycle which reduce turbine efficiency. That the part I understand exactly why.
It could be one extra example of NRC overregulation, I'm not sure this is really necessary, or just, the reactor hasn't been tested with temperature above a certain temp, so we can't allow it to be operated at such and such temp.
I know LFTR reactors are designed to operate between 700 and 800C, and specifically allow for cooling from water or air.
I believe hormesis is true from this: I was born and raised in Vitoria-ES-Brazil, an hour drive away from Guarapari-ES-Brazil, yep, that city on Pandora's Promise, that shows up to 30 uSv/s on the geiger counter. I spent all my summers from age 9-19 either in Guarapari or Marataizes (both monazite sand beaches). And I'm not an isolated case. I have many hundreds of family, friends and acquaintances that did exactly the same. I know dozens of people that lived their entire lifes in Guarapari. My mom spent a good portion of her last 25 summers doing the same. She's 64, and is extremely healthy. She knows a couple hundred people her age that did the same, only a few had cancer, like 2 or 3% cancer rate. In Guarapari alone, tens of thousands of people are subject to at least 1 uSv/s 24x7, or 30000mSv yearly. That's many thousands of times maximum recommended yearly exposure. Studies show Guarapari cancer rates within Brazilian average. Studies also show that people in Denver and Salt Lake City have less cancer than in sea level cities. Airline cabin crew (pilots and flight attendants) are subject to 2uSv/s exposure while at cruising altitudes. Please show me studies with elevated cancer levels among airline crew members. Guarapari is also know as "cidade saude" or "city of health", it's sands are known to have healing properties, people with chronic diseases go there for their healing powers. What do you think are in the waters of those hot waters Franklin Delano Roosevelt treated himself in Georgia (hot springs), that's right, also radioactive waters. There are hundreds of similar cases. There's a nuclear reactor in the UK that is nicknamed a shining reactor, because it glows in the night for neutron radiation that is continuously emitted by the reactor, where are the cancers from that ? There are a few videos on youtube that show some of this information. The data is concrete. I challenge to be proved wrong.
Finally, please show me cancer studies that show workers from modern nuclear power plants have more cancers that average. I think you will find they have less cancer than average.
Large, powerful, long range transmission lines aren't that expensive. My Brazil transmits many tens of GWs worth of electricity over distances around 2000km. They are great if you have a cheap electricity source (large hydro), that you can't really choose where to build (you must build in the strongest flow rivers that have enough vertical gradient).
Instead, old fashioned water cooled nukes can be built anywhere you have a cold water source like the sea, a river, a lake. They only have problems where the water is too hot (like over 30C / 80F in the summer). Proposed high temperature reactors could even be air cooled, and don't require cold air either, so they can be built anywhere. Nuclear isn't cheap, but if you don't have a big old hydro plant, they are the only low cost, reliable, clean electricity source a country can have. Spent nuclear fuel (SNF) is not a real problem, if we build the LFTR / Thorium reactors, since they can burn the uranium SNF (like 95% Thorium for 5% SNF), and there are other solutions to burn the SNF too. If all SNF in the world were fissioned, it would make up for a few decades of our entire electricity supply !
Don't let others tell you that nuclear must be expensive. Half of current nukes cost is a direct consequence of anti nuclear lobby to over regulate nuclear power plants and the cost of multiple stop/resume construction due to political pressure to shutdown nuclear power plant construction. Nukes seem expensive, but when you consider that the uranium is cheap (less than 15% of the total nukes cost) over it's lifetime a nuke is cheaper than coal (don't even need tax breaks, just low interest loans, since the nukes cost is mostly before it starts operating, much like hydro).
Until someone proves hormesis wrong, I believe its true. Consider 1 or 2 aspirin a day is PROVEN to be better than zero. One hundred aspirin a day will eventually kill you. Hormesis means, a little radiation is good, while too much is bad. Except that the NRC, EPA, and other government agencies involved with the multiple aspects of nuclear stuff blatantly disagree. Lets separate two things: - Small radiation releases even from nuclear power plants are good (alpha, beta, gamma, neutron radiation) - Releases of radioactive materials that are proven to harm humans, not so much, but as long as that only happens due to an accident, it's not a big deal, the problem is ingesting those materials, not receiving radiation from them The anti nuke environmentalists mix the whole thing up, add a huge dose of cold war trauma, and presto, we have the any nuclear thing is horrible speech.
So we have two big issues: 1 - Nuclear power is severely over regulated, because it's based on an assumption the inverse of hormesis (any radiation you get from nukes is bad), licensing a nuclear reactor takes over 2 years in North America, most of Europe, and any other developed countries out there, while a coal power plant that outputs one thousand times as much radiation all the time (coal has little amounts of uranium and thorium), however even one part per million out of ten million tons of coal is ten tons, and uranium/thorium is naturally occurring, coal gets a pass, while nuclear gets buried with bureaucracy. 2 - Your average chemical industry is a much worse hazard than a nuke, yet you don't see protests to close them. Specially a terrorist attack on a large chlorine / fluorine tank will kill people by the boatloads if those tanks are within a few miles of a large population, yet the worse, most stupid nuclear accident to ever happen (that will never happen again) Chernobyl killed just one hundred people from direct radiation exposure (several thousands got cancer), but if Chernobyl had the most basic secondary containment structure present in every nuke in a developed country (and most developing countries too), Chernobyl wouldn't be much worse than three mile island (zero radiation deaths, no cancer cases attributed to that event).
Double standard anyone ? The real question is if the environmentalists actually cared about saving the environment, they would go after the true targets, which are coal burning, the most hazardous chemical industries and oil burning. Instead they go after the good guy, cause nukes have prevented millions of deaths due to billions of tons of coal that weren't burned instead, so even if you consider all nuclear tests, the WWII detonations over Japan, and the worse case, most absurd studies on cancer deaths due to all nuclear accidents, still nukes are safer than coal by at least 2 orders of magnitude, and safer than natural gas by at least one order (the deep horizon accident was a natural gas explosion, and if you add up all natural gas related deaths, there are close to one hundred per year worldwide).
My conclusion is, there are no honestly anti nuclear environmentalists, they are all in cahoots with the oil lobby, because they know that solar and wind won't displace home heating, and that electric vehicles will take 15 years before they are 20% of new cars produced (and 30 years before they are 50% of the operating car fleet, best case).
Do you know that many anti nuclear folks in youtube are also climate change denialists ? I tried to argue with a few of them. My login is the same of slashdot and youtube, if you bother you can find the posts.
Finally, I point you one guy that has lots of $$$ (a billion of them) reasons to be anti nuke, Elon Musk, the guy is the largest shareholder of Solar City, yet if you search, you will see him saying the US should be building more nukes. Because he's a true environmentalist that is actually spearheading the electric car revolution.
0,28 EUR, so 0,40 USD. Still much higher than USA electricity. I'm paying R$ 0,47/kWh / EUR 0,14/kWh (all included), tax burden on electricity production in Brazil is 50%.
Thorium fueled reactors exist. But in North America and Europe there are no molten salt reactors operating (regardless of nuclear fuel). I believe China has a molten salt mock reactor (testing the chemical properties of the coolant salt, the plumbing, the pumping, everything but the actual nuclear fission). But LFTR means Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (a type of MSR), specifically one that has integral processing facility, it gets fuel online as well as fission products also get removed online (no downtime requirements) and it's waste is mostly fission products (using at least 99% of the Thorium nuclear potential, compared to all solid fuel reactors that use no more than 1% of the original fuel energy, leaving 99% material unfissioned). There are some advantages to Thorium solid fueled water cooled reactors (like the one operating in Germany) versus uranium and/or plutonium fueled water cooled ones, but the advantages are tiny (perhaps burn 1,5% of nuclear material instead of 0,5-1% for uranium fueled) plus a small safety margin (higher fuel melting point), but LFTR offer 200 times better fuel utilization (less nuclear material mined), radically better safety margins (as the fuel is molten with the coolant, it can be easily drained into a passive shutdown configuration, it's walk away safe, no computers or human intervention required, manual shut down is just stopping a small fan to melt the salt plug (so the core fluid goes into the drain pan, including the nuclear fuel). The salt plug + drain pan is only possible on molten fuel reactors.
The GOP is a mix of: Tea Party loonies that want to destroy the federal government, while they reign terror on economic interests that don't support them at the state level (like Tesla)
Religious fundamentalists which want to dictate their views on health, society relationships (very anti libertarian of them)
Libertarian which really means my rights are more important than yours
Your common republicans which are pro war, defend massive wasteful expenditures in the military regardless of actual need (huge federal government), have always been in love with every invasion of privacy made in the name of national security (but wouldn't mind selling those secrets for a lot of money to their friends in the private sector)
A smashing minority of common sense politicians which genuinely want to reform the tax code, want a smarter/smaller military, are willing to make bipartidarism work, want less entitlements, AKA, Republicans In Name Only
This is my very last reply. You will never accept the aspect where you are wrong, which is the real cost of nuclear, wind and solar. My goal is to inform others. I have nothing further to add, no matter would you try to argue. Here's my final shot.
German eletricity cost: US$ 0,46 / kWh American electricity cost: US$ 0,23 / kWh I was just watching on Charlie Rose / Bloomberg TV an interview with Laurence Fink, Chairman and CEO of BlackRock, that they have two large datacenters, established right by two american hydro dams, and they buy electricity for US$ 0,03 / kWh. Just because Brazil could invest massively on Solar and Wind, the simple fact is those investments don't add up like the Green claim. There are no true 100% green oriented "smart policies", it's really about giving billions to Siemens, Westinghouse, GE, Hitachi, British lords, German billionaire investors, plus a jobs program (for all the extra workers needed to inspect wind turbines). Take the subsidies off and those projects crash.
Brazil has an extremely capable grid. We transfer tens of GWs for thousands of Kms. That makes sense for large hydro. It doesn't for electricity that costs 10x more.
Thorium LFTR a "paper technology", humm, the core reactor characteristics have been demonstrated before I was born (I'm 41 BTW). The critical features outside the core are chemical challenges that good chemists could solve with a few dozen year-man effort. perhaps pessimisticly a US$ 10 billion problem to do the first research reactor, finalize commercial design, get the production line ready. Nobody is saying they can make LFTR happen in 1 year, but instead 2-3 years for a small scale research reactor and less than 10 years for the production line working. But there's zero point in doing this unless we get the nuclear paranoia out of people's heads. Unfortunately mankind waited until the scientists from the Thorium project at ORNL were all dead or getting senile before we tried to revive this tech.
Thorium is essentially free fuel, cause it's an "undesirable" byproduct of rare earth mining, since we don't use it. There are dozen of rare earth mines that would each one produce as much thorium yearly than the whole world would need if it converted 100% of worldwide electricity production (and electrified 100% of the car fleet), and still replace 100% of fossil demand left from H2O + CO2 + a lot of heat (about 5000 tons per year, we could easily produce 100k tons per year). They can't operate cause the US EPA qualifies thorium as something dangerous, when you can put a 50g pellet of thorium in your pocket for years, and nothing will happen to you. I know because I sunbathed all summer long from age 9-19 in Thorium rich sands, primarily in a city known an Brazil's "city of health", people go to those sands for its therapeutic characteristics, exactly because of Thorium, Uranium and Radium. It's called Guarapari, and it's featured in Pandora's Promise.
I said before Brazil electricity demand is close to 200GW, I was wrong, it's close to 100GW. Germany is 70GW. But 20 years from now Brazil is likely to need 150GW, and perhaps Germany will be 80GW tops. Brazil is an interesting case of how you can do electricity investments are done on a purely economical basis. And guess what, we're building 2 huge hydro dams (with combined power similar to our largest hydro plant, Itaipu), that dam is 2000Km away from it's largest consumption base, but it's still very much cheap electricity. We're building our 3rd nuclear station, about 1/10th the electricity production than the dam, but it's in a central location, a few hundred Kms from the 3 largest metro areas in Brazil, and we're now planning to build 5 or so new nuclear sites in the edge of the largest metro areas in Brazil (still in planning stages). Our total solar + wind generation installed capacity is less than our smallest nuclear (660MWe). We have been building lots of gas thermal plants to make up in between. If you remove all the political / protest hurdles from nucl
Do you work for an ISP or a Carrier ? Provisioning ratios are still in the range of 20Kbps to 500Kbps per broadband user. Back in the 1.5Mbps ADSL times, ISPs provisioned on a 18:1 ratio, so 85Kbps per user. Even as speeds increased to 10 to 50Mbps, bandwidth consumption didn't scale, so I bet those 50Mbps broadbands are provisioned at about 200Kbps per user or less (50:1 easy). Users don't download all at once. Most users don't do torrent. The bulk of today's links are still 10Gbps. 100Gbps isn't very common yet. Links = DWDM tributaries. Either 1Gbps, 10Gbps, 40Gbps or 100Gbps (assuming all ethernet). There is a lot of 10/40 Gbps aggregation using WDM (less than 16 channels). You only see that kind of DWDM aggregation between metroplexes. I would bet Verizon don't need more than a single 100Gbps (or 10 x 10Gbps WDM) from Seattle to San Francisco for instance, or from Phoenix to LA. Of course if the Phoenix to LA fiber comes from DFW, then you're likely to carry all in the same fiber cable, but not necessarily on the same strand. Long distance fiber cables are 36 to 144 fiber strands. Do you use a single strand using a pretty expensive system or use multiple strands (concentrating only the really long range traffic on the DWDM system). Cheaper (less strand) cable too small difference. Just because tech exists, it doesn't mean carriers are using it. Most optical tributaries in the world use only bi-di WDM (TX and RX on the same strand) or even no WDM (two strands for a single link). More overseas fibers also don't use 100Gbps tributaries yet. Regeneration equipment (deep underwater) needs to be replaced to upgrade. And routers with only support for 10Gbps are way cheaper than 100Gbps capable ones.
I worked for a small carrier that served a dozen small ISPs with 3Gbps, estimated about 50k users downstream, not your 10Mbps plus users, but still all Mbps plus service. That was last year. I estimate 100% of Brazil's bandwidth to North America and Europe fits in 100 10Gbps links easy. 100 million users. One DWDM system would take care of everything. Of course internal bandwidth is more than that.
In Brazil the three largest national backbone carriers reject peering from anyone but the 10 largest other backbone carriers (not an exact number, but a list of rules that reject all but the pretty big ones). Foreign backbones also reject peering, but that makes a little more sense (I'll peer with you in Miami, but not in Brazil, otherwise I'm giving you a free link to my customers abroad, in Brazil I sell links).
Their strategy is if they reject peering (as a cartel), chances are fifty/fifty the other side will have to buy a link from one of them. But in practice the other large carriers that do peer openly end up getting that business.
We have a huge IXP in Sao Paulo (the largest metroplex in the country). Most medium ISPs and almost all content providers are present at the Sao Paulo IXP and peer. Its not really a single IXP, but rather 10 points of presence connected directly by 10 or 100 Gbps links. Connect to one POP and you're connected to everybody.
Maybe the USA is regressing to a cartel of the largest boys peer, but anyone a bit smaller is left out. Troubling.
Verizon uses Level 3 or Qwest to get to AWS ? Insane. Get off Verizon. Don't go back, ever. I know, impossible. Sorry. I'm from Brazil. I thought Verizon was a nationwide carrier, are they ? Only small/medium ISPs do that. The possibility is AWS isn't large enough to have carrier status. So Verizon don't want to peer (they want AWS to buy bandwidth) but they might have peering agreements with L3 and/or Qwest. And L3 and Qwest certainly have peering status with Verizon. So they follow the cheapest route. But a carrier as large as Verizon should have tens of Gbps of bandwidth to exchange with AWS (considering just netflix being hosted at AWS). More than enough to peer.
Anyhow, this just shows that Verizon is punishing their customers by not doing direct peering. That part I can say without further information. They are bartering their customer bandwidth demand for ransom with AWS / Netflix. There might not be explicit throttling, they just throw that bandwidth through an already congested link.
I'm sure Netflix would be willing to pay fair backbone costs. But Verizon wants to profit from it instead. This has been extremely well documented between Netflix and Comcast. Netflix offered to peer at Comcast regional centers. But Comcast considers Netflix revenues made using Comcast customers to be something they are entitled to profit from as well (directly from Netflix).
The reality is today's routers and fiber networks are one thousand times faster than 1995 at the same cost (from 155Mbps to 100Gbps). And price is dropping constantly. They can save more money by dropping Cisco/Juniper and going open source than trying to throttle anything. Trying to throttle 100Gbps backbone links is like trying to drink from a firehose. They should only throttle bandwidth they pay per Gbps (international links).
Internet Exchange Points. If you are a customer of a large nationwide ISP accessing a large content provider present in the same country, you aren't going to have to go through any 3rd parties, as your ISP will exchange traffic at the closest IXP (directly). There around 50 IXPs in the USA alone. Many Hundreds worldwide. So the theory that the problem is elsewhere doesn't sound very credible. If they have trouble connecting to the closest IXP, in all likelyhood you'll see a broad slowdown. I know a thing or two about this. I'm an expert on this stuff. In all likelyhood, it is Verizon throttling AWS so they can charge a premium to keep their traffic unthrottled. To be pessimistic 80% of US ISP bandwidth is the result of direct peering between two ISPs or and ISP and the data center where content is hosted (or mirrored). The fiber cable where data passes might be leased (extremely likely), worst case having a large L2 ethernet switch from the IXP between the two side's border routers.
Yes your grid is fine. Except for the extra cost for this exotic experiment. You're paying so much for electricity this little experiment of Germany is un applicable to the developing world. Heck, it's uneconomical even for the US (given the much longer transmission distances you need to move power from east to west coast). Like I was told when I got my privates pilots license, you can even get a barn to fly if you attach enough horsepower. It will just be extremely inefficient. That's the Germany electricity plan. Climate change is a global problem. It needs global solutions. That begs for affordable solutions. Do you think China and India will adopt solutions they can't afford. Germany's financially wasteful experiment only makes sense because you hate nuclear energy. For the extra cost of your experiment over 20 years nuclear could clean up all of Europe's electrical grid. Plus it's not like you're getting rid of coal anytime soon. That has to be the most important part of the plan. Stop all coal burning. All of it. If the plan is too expensive, then you can't quite do that. Next step is stop natural gas burning. Oh, you need high temperature process heat as well, otherwise you can't have an oil refinery, petrochemical industry, steel production, fertilizer production,... Your experiment has zero applicability to process heat, it's never produced from electricity because it's way too expensive. Maybe you can produce natural gas from biomass for process heat. But you will need huge qtys of biomass. That's a close as you can get to renewable process heat without a high temperature nuclear reactor (Thorium LFTR, the only reactor that can replace all fossil fuels because it can provide efficient electricity, process heat, desalinization, producing fuels and fertilizers directly from H2O and CO2). Conventional nuclear is limited at 350C, not nearly hot enough for direct process heat for most uses. At least twice that is necessary. Thorium LFTR provides a solution so efficient you can convert desert land into a green heaven (with sea water converted into fresh water in scales almost unlimited). And since it's no good for nuclear bombs, it never got the funding it deserves. But the countries that have the money to make it happen (and need it) will never fund it, because it will kill their cash cowl (oil production). It's not a paper solution. The only reason it was partially tested in the 1960's and 1970's was because the US air force wanted a nuclear powered bombers before ICBMs were perfected. The test went all well as it could have been, with less than 5% of the funding of uranium/plutonium breeder reactors. But was shutdown after ICBMs were perfected, but Thorium isn't good for making bombs. Over half of the challenges with making Thorium reactors were shown to work fine, there were no failures, they just lacked the money to finish it. In total over 22000 hours of safe operation. That was what nuclear was supposed to be. But even today's nuclear is safe, it gets expensive because people keep throwing political hurdles that increase cost. In countries that aren't anti nuclear, nuclear power is about the same cost as coal (like South Korea). No I'm not giving up. I'm the rational equivalent of your typical anti-nuke activist that won't stop until he kills all nuclear stations in the world. But in my case, I'm pro economical solutions. Germany's solution is only economical because you're filthy rich and can afford it. Before you tell me to take care of my own grid. Germany has been exporting anti nuclear sentiment to the rest of the world.
No wind and 5 km/h is the same, turbines output is speed cubed. Wind turbines need something like 20 Km/h to be producing serious energy. 0% or 5% capacity generation is just about the same. I like wind for Brazil, we have 2000 Km of coastline with constant winds over 8,5m/s (30km/h) half the year, day and night. Exactly in the dry season when hydro dams aren't being replenished much. I think 30km/h would have wind turbines humming at over 60% capacity or so, that's a proper place for wind electricity. A city I lived for 3 years as a kid was 5 degrees south latitude, so solar produces just about the same year round, the seasons basicly don't exist. Where I live now minimum sunlight in the first winter day is still 10 hours. That is still a good day for Solar PV. Do you have that level of consistency ? Ok, not nights, evenings. You only need 40% of the load at 7PM ? I don't think so.
1 - The last really old plants (1950s designs) in the world was decommissioned almost 15 years ago, the ones operating in Germany were decommissioned even earlier. Nuclear power was only widely deployed in the mid 1960s, before that were only demonstration/research/plutonium making reactors, producing so little electricity they were shutdown in the late 70s. 2 - Your argument that is was decided 20 years ago to shutdown nuclear, with nuclear power bribing govt was more like the govt extorted more money from nuclear operator with higher taxes instead. Yes, public opinion in Germany is extremely anti-nuclear, which is unfortunate, since the best anti-nuclear argument is nuclear don't load follow (they should produce the cheapest electricity, and be operated around the clock instead). 3-Are you aware that average generation capacity of solar in the winter solstice (in German lattitudes) is about 1% (compared to 25% in the summer) ? Solar PV in nov/dec/jan in Germany is less than 2GW at noon.
You export energy in a bright summer day, and import in a hot night in the summer and on windless days in the winter. You're trying to mislead others pretending you don't depend on France and neighbor countries with large baseload sources to make up for what Germany today lacks in baseload generation capacity. The current German plan is 100% contingent on importing energy often, and when you do export, it's due to overproduction, it's energy that must be dumped into neighbor countries (to avoid throwing it away). I suggest you compare the net cost of those exports and imports. It should be telling.
I do make mistakes but I'm learning, you aren't going to see me repeating wrong data like many environmentalists do everyday in their anti-nuclear speeches.
Thanks for the data, your information is interesting. You do make me feel a little bad for hitting you with this, but I'm scared shitless from climate change.
6 pointer earthquakes are a non issue for nukes. It's the 7.5+ pointer ones that actually are trouble. Specially the 8.0 plus (the strongest ones you see in the Ring of Fire). You know that from a 6 to an 8 pointer there's 100 times increase in energy ?
Nukes secondary containment structures have extremely solid steel+concrete structures (as strong as one meter of solid steel), and they are only needed in case of a meltdown/rupture of internal core plumbing, so only extreme tornadoes are any risk, and even then a small one (except for Chernobyl style nukes, which there are none in any serious democracies, developed or not, Chernobyl didn't have that, I believe that even former USSR states got rid of all of them after Chernobyl).
Water cooled nuclear isn't load following, but fluid fuel nukes are (Thorium LFTR and IFR). Germany could take that extra energy and pump water back into dams, produce hydrogen (fuel cell cars are starting mass production in 2014, although I like Elon Musk's statement that they are fool cells, except when you have enormous electricity surplus you could use to produce hydrogen from them, producing hydrogen from natural gas is an environmental stupidity).
Specially interesting is Thorium LFTR technology, because they can operate at 700C (with possibility of higher temp designs), which is hot enough to run many industrial processes that otherwise would burn natural gas (or petrol/coal if natural gas is unavailable). For instance, an Oil refinery typically burns natural gas to produce process heat for refining fuels. That gas could otherwise be used to power cars or heat homes. Canada tar sands production is looking into high temperature nuclear to power their filthy oil extraction from tar sands processes (so they can export their gas to Japan). Process heat is also needed to produce fertilizers, run petrochemical processes (like producing plastic/nylon/...). This could also be used to directly produce renewable fuels from H2O + CO2 (directly replacing gasoline and diesel). I'm yet to see a case of high temperature process heat from solar directly (doing this from electricity would be extremely inefficient).
One smart thing the Germans could do is a 160Km/h speed limit (trying to propose something that's still faster than speed limits elsewhere) on the Autobahns. Not because of safety but because of emissions. Just electronically ticket those going faster, so that the rich can keep going at 250Km/h, but charge enough money to get most people driving below the limit. But I reckon this would be like trying to take machine guns away from the US rednecks, there would be a revolt if someone tried to do it.
Scrubbers on coal are positive, they remove the sulfur and other poisonous emissions, but the CO2 is still going out. I just found out those brand new plants emit 300Kg CO2 per second at peak load, or 4,7 million tons of CO2 per year if they are operated on average at 50% load capacity. That's 4,7 billion tons of CO2 yearly for one thousand of those (assuming they operate at a low capacity factor of 50%, in tandem with lots of wind and solar). You really need to look at the volume of coal a power plant burns, even the most efficient ones. An entire train filled with coal (like 150 wagons) every week.
Germany turning off nuclear has already elicited responses from the Indians and Chinese that if they can do that, then they don't need to go nuclear quite as fast (keep burning coal), but their plants don't have scrubbers, don't use ultra efficient combined cycle turbines, and China is still starting up a few new coal power plants every month, and they aren't nearly as clean as Germany's. You clean up your coal, USA is migrating from Coal to Natu
I'm trying to find those 1950s reactors recently shutdown, nothing yet.
I'm all for shutting down very old nuclear power plants, but with a plan to replace them. Specially on earthquake prone areas. Japan isn't the best place for nukes. I've never heard of earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis in Germany, it looks like nuclear perfect land. Except for the radical greens that hate nuclear much more than they hate greenhouse gases. I looks much more of a cold war reaction, a fear of WWIII, than an honest fear of nuclear power. Nuclear weapons have this effect on people. What Germany has done with Solar and Wind is nothing but amazing, really good. But what happens on very cold winter nights when there's zero wind ? Germany consumes more electricity in the winter than in the summer. If Germany can produce it's electricity with renewables alone (without nuclear) it will be awesome, but please shutdown coal before nuclear. If those plants were unsafe, they would have been shutdown before Fukushima. It was a knee jerk reaction. Nuclear reactors have enormous safety margins, and they have maintenance procedures that allow to keep them running for a long time, much like aircraft can. The big difference in older aircraft have higher fuel consumption (and petrol is always getting more expensive), nuclear power plants don't have the same issue. Ok, so I exaggerated, but so did you, all nuclear reactors built even in the 1960s have been decommissioned for at least 15 years. And Germany did built a few lignite burning coal power plants recently. Lignite is one of the dirtiest coal types of them all.
The anti-nuclear people cherry pick any nuclear project failure / cost overrun, and paint it as the most common scenario.
Just as dishonest as the climate change deniers that cherry pick the studies that favor them, branding everything else as hoax or dishonest.
PS: I'm not a fan of water cooled nuclear reactors, aka 95% of the reactors in operation in the world. They work and are safe, but we need something much better. But saying no to nuclear is a dumb idea. Solar have a very interesting advantage that it can be installed in tiny increments and come online very quickly. Wind is a little slower, but anything that provides baseload power is a large, heavy, complex power plant that takes time to build (hydro, nuclear, coal, natural gas, geothermal). I'm yet to see someone discuss non nuclear renewables with nuclear rationally (except for a single youtube discussion by canadians, even then the anti nuclear side did rehashed a few nonsensical arguments, at least he was civil and the debate wasn't a series of one side interrupting the other).
The same Germany that decided to shutdown all nuclear power, and is now burning more coal than ever ? I guess all the education wasn't good enough then. Our enemy number one should be coal and petrol. Enemy number two natural gas. Once we can get rid of 90% of coal and petrol, and at least 75% of natural gas, then you can think about nuclear, not the other way around.
Nuclear is safer than coal. Much safer. Coal burning releases uranium, thorium, arsenic and sulfur into the atmosphere. A nuclear plant releases far less radiation into the environment. Have you seen an ash pile from a coal power plant ? Please watch on you tube, search for "coal ash spill" "coal ash disaster"
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Coal kills hundreds of thousands yearly. Any normally operating coal power plant (and the mine its supplied from) is a constantly occurring environmental disaster.
A Chernobyl type accident won't happen again, ever. The reactor had no secondary containment vessel, if it had one, it would have been much like three mile island. The reactor would have been a total loss, but there would have been no deaths, maybe a few cancers.
Even then, if you consider every mutation, every cancer as a death, Chernobyl is about the same monthly worldwide deaths from coal !
Stop cherry picking what you don't like about Nuclear and ignoring the rest.
Even natural gas mining and distribution kills hundreds yearly. As well as oil exploration.
France has zero operational fast breeders. Phenix was shutdown in 2009 and Superphenix in 1998. The first little one was shutdown decades ago.
As for France nuclear load following, there are many sources that state that.
Even 5% steps every 2 or 3 minutes is good enough. Hydro can do better minute by minute load following. But the sources claim 5% every 1 minute.
Anyhow, nuclear total fuel cost is 15%, so load following doesn't same much cost, and doesn't produce extra CO2, so they can afford to let it overproduce a little more electricity than other countries might.
15 years for a nuclear plant is the result of nuclear over regulation.
With some sanity this period should be less than 10 years.
Big hydro takes just as long.
France total generating capacity (end 2011) is 126 GWe, including 25 GWe hydro, 28 GWe fossil fuel, 6.6 GWe wind and 2.2 GWe solar PV. Peak demand is about 100 GWe. In 2012 gross production was 425 billion kWh from nuclear, 62.5 from hydro, 22.5 from coal, 20.5 from natural gas, 19.5 from solar and wind, and 7.5 from biofuels & waste, of total 561 billion kWh. With about 93% from clean sources, I would contend they will do far more good by electrifying their car fleet than trying to reduce their CO2 emissions from electricity further.
Shuting down a nuclear reactor only makes sense if it's at end of life, and can't be extended. Most nuclear costs are until start of operations.
I know how a grid works. I know that due to Germany dense population you can afford to have a strong grid. But still, you need about 6GW worth of name plate capacity in solar panels and wind turbines to make up to a 1GWe nuclear plant. Assuming 4GW of wind and 2GW of Solar PV, just the wind part costs as much as the nuke.
If your plan was economical, your electricity would be cheaper than France.
A quote about Germany's plan:
The cost of replacing nuclear power with renewables is estimated by the government to amount to some EUR 1000 billion. One trillion EUR. Even assuming an exorbitant EUR 10 billion per nuke, you can build 100GWe with that money, enough to provide 130% of your electricity from nukes alone. Even if it's EUR 500 billion, it would still be enough to replace all old nukes plus fossil fuels. Actual nuke costs is less than EUR 5 billion per GWe.
Long term more and more electricity will be required to recharge EVs overnight, so long term less load following should be needed. And the pumped hydro is the only truly sensible part of the current plan.
GE, Westinghouse, Areva, Hitachi, Siements don't care about the environment, climate change or whatever, they care about profits.
That's right, they don't care for Thorium fluid reactors cause there's no fuel fabrication profits.
My weird idea came from Alvin Weinberg (one of the Manhattan project scientists, credited with the invention of the light water nuclear reactor), and a nuclear engineering PhD named Kirk Sorensen (the 100 page essay is his PhD dissertation). So it's mostly an american idea. Except that the Chinese are doing it too. As well as the Czecs. So are the French. Humm so are the Indians. All of them are fluid fuel reactors (most salts, but some molten metal as coolant, with Thorium fuel).The main advantage is having a fluid fuel/coolant thorium reactor.
I wouldn't call the German plan retarded, just way too expensive. Just too slow to implement completely. Just something that will eventually be shown to be bad economics.
Solar, wind and pumped hydro is expensive, I just showed you the facts from our electricity bill comparison, however you're still in the fantasy the Germans have an economical plan. Solar PV produces less than 10% of electricity in the winter than in the summer, 1/10th ! Wind is extremely finicky, wind turbine output until 45Km/h winds is proportional to wind speed cubed, so if 45Km/h is full power, 20Km/h 10% power ! And just a drop from 45Km/h to 35Km/h looses half the power ! Hence all the pumped hydro because you can't produce solar and wind when you need, you must store it using expensive methods.
Nuclear just keeps humming. And French nuclear reactors can go from 30% to 100% power in 5% per minute adjustments. The problem isn't the tech, it's the lack of vision and lack of interest in making it work.
No it's not technologically challenging, compared to how hard it was to perfect light water reactors.
MSR reactors weren't built because they aren't well suited for submarines, and light water nuclear reactors are perfect for subs, but far from ideal for earth bound utilization. Nuclear ships need very little nuclear power (like 5% of a large civilian nuclear reactor, so nuclear fuel lasts a long time in submarine reactors anyhow, LFTR fuel efficiency doesn't matter for subs), even an aircraft carrier needs much less than your typical 1GWe civilian reactor.
The main argument the greens got right is nuclear research was driven by military needs. Then it was minimally adapted to civilian usage. 100% the truth. A very ugly truth.
I just read a 100 page essay on the Manhattan Project (with the raw original journals from the scientists in the end), and it's dam clear that until 1950 the heat produced by nuclear reactors were considered mostly an extremely undesirable side effect on the quest for plutonium for nuclear weapons. And that Thorium (and molten salt reactors) were never seriously experimented with because Thorium couldn't breed more U-233 than it consumed with 1940s nuclear tech, while U-235 could breed Plutonium easily since U-235 was fissile, while Thorium is fertile (like U-238). And the only U-233 nuclear bomb tested under performed (there are no U-233 in any known nuclear bomb arsenal in the world).
The reason we got civilian nuclear reactors was admiral Rickover and his desire to have nuclear powered subs.
Total investment in thorium molten salt reactors was like a few million USD / year until the program was cancelled in 1971 compared to many hundreds millions USD / year for uranium / plutonium fast breeders. Like at least 90 times more money going into fast breeders. Yet, molten salt reactors demonstrated 22 thousand hours of problem free operation, while fast breeders kept overrunning their budget, until president Clinton killed fast breeder research.
It was a matter of politics and military interests, not of technical challenges.
Big oil as a big hand on this whole story too.
I know exactly what LNT means. And it's BS. Search hormesis in youtube, and you'll find a few medical PhDs defending it.
If the max recommended exposure of 1 mSv/year was anything credible, Guarapari would have very elevated cancer levels, off the scale. The workers in a nuclear power plant that get the most radiation get a tiny fraction of what Guarapari inhabitants get.
I didn't say 1% out of one million people get more cancer than usual in Guarapari, quite the opposite. A typical quote is 30% of us will get cancer over our lifetimes. So people in my mom's age range of 65 (and their same aged friends) should already have around 10% cancer incidence, and we're seeing one order of magnitude less.
And it's not just the monazitic sand radiation, there's also very strong sun radiation as well.
Please lookup radiation from ground radon as well. Most radiation we get is actually from Radon (resulting from decay of Thorium and Uranium in the earth's core).
One example:
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com...
Water above 75F (24C) requires shutting down the reactor.
Water cooled nuclear plants operate at 350C, 20C difference in cooling water reduce the thermal cycle which reduce turbine efficiency.
That the part I understand exactly why.
It could be one extra example of NRC overregulation, I'm not sure this is really necessary, or just, the reactor hasn't been tested with temperature above a certain temp, so we can't allow it to be operated at such and such temp.
I know LFTR reactors are designed to operate between 700 and 800C, and specifically allow for cooling from water or air.
I believe hormesis is true from this:
I was born and raised in Vitoria-ES-Brazil, an hour drive away from Guarapari-ES-Brazil, yep, that city on Pandora's Promise, that shows up to 30 uSv/s on the geiger counter.
I spent all my summers from age 9-19 either in Guarapari or Marataizes (both monazite sand beaches). And I'm not an isolated case. I have many hundreds of family, friends and acquaintances that did exactly the same. I know dozens of people that lived their entire lifes in Guarapari.
My mom spent a good portion of her last 25 summers doing the same. She's 64, and is extremely healthy. She knows a couple hundred people her age that did the same, only a few had cancer, like 2 or 3% cancer rate.
In Guarapari alone, tens of thousands of people are subject to at least 1 uSv/s 24x7, or 30000mSv yearly. That's many thousands of times maximum recommended yearly exposure.
Studies show Guarapari cancer rates within Brazilian average.
Studies also show that people in Denver and Salt Lake City have less cancer than in sea level cities.
Airline cabin crew (pilots and flight attendants) are subject to 2uSv/s exposure while at cruising altitudes.
Please show me studies with elevated cancer levels among airline crew members.
Guarapari is also know as "cidade saude" or "city of health", it's sands are known to have healing properties, people with chronic diseases go there for their healing powers.
What do you think are in the waters of those hot waters Franklin Delano Roosevelt treated himself in Georgia (hot springs), that's right, also radioactive waters. There are hundreds of similar cases.
There's a nuclear reactor in the UK that is nicknamed a shining reactor, because it glows in the night for neutron radiation that is continuously emitted by the reactor, where are the cancers from that ?
There are a few videos on youtube that show some of this information.
The data is concrete. I challenge to be proved wrong.
Finally, please show me cancer studies that show workers from modern nuclear power plants have more cancers that average. I think you will find they have less cancer than average.
Large, powerful, long range transmission lines aren't that expensive. My Brazil transmits many tens of GWs worth of electricity over distances around 2000km. They are great if you have a cheap electricity source (large hydro), that you can't really choose where to build (you must build in the strongest flow rivers that have enough vertical gradient).
Instead, old fashioned water cooled nukes can be built anywhere you have a cold water source like the sea, a river, a lake. They only have problems where the water is too hot (like over 30C / 80F in the summer). Proposed high temperature reactors could even be air cooled, and don't require cold air either, so they can be built anywhere. Nuclear isn't cheap, but if you don't have a big old hydro plant, they are the only low cost, reliable, clean electricity source a country can have. Spent nuclear fuel (SNF) is not a real problem, if we build the LFTR / Thorium reactors, since they can burn the uranium SNF (like 95% Thorium for 5% SNF), and there are other solutions to burn the SNF too. If all SNF in the world were fissioned, it would make up for a few decades of our entire electricity supply !
Don't let others tell you that nuclear must be expensive. Half of current nukes cost is a direct consequence of anti nuclear lobby to over regulate nuclear power plants and the cost of multiple stop/resume construction due to political pressure to shutdown nuclear power plant construction. Nukes seem expensive, but when you consider that the uranium is cheap (less than 15% of the total nukes cost) over it's lifetime a nuke is cheaper than coal (don't even need tax breaks, just low interest loans, since the nukes cost is mostly before it starts operating, much like hydro).
Until someone proves hormesis wrong, I believe its true.
Consider 1 or 2 aspirin a day is PROVEN to be better than zero. One hundred aspirin a day will eventually kill you.
Hormesis means, a little radiation is good, while too much is bad.
Except that the NRC, EPA, and other government agencies involved with the multiple aspects of nuclear stuff blatantly disagree.
Lets separate two things:
- Small radiation releases even from nuclear power plants are good (alpha, beta, gamma, neutron radiation)
- Releases of radioactive materials that are proven to harm humans, not so much, but as long as that only happens due to an accident, it's not a big deal, the problem is ingesting those materials, not receiving radiation from them
The anti nuke environmentalists mix the whole thing up, add a huge dose of cold war trauma, and presto, we have the any nuclear thing is horrible speech.
So we have two big issues:
1 - Nuclear power is severely over regulated, because it's based on an assumption the inverse of hormesis (any radiation you get from nukes is bad), licensing a nuclear reactor takes over 2 years in North America, most of Europe, and any other developed countries out there, while a coal power plant that outputs one thousand times as much radiation all the time (coal has little amounts of uranium and thorium), however even one part per million out of ten million tons of coal is ten tons, and uranium/thorium is naturally occurring, coal gets a pass, while nuclear gets buried with bureaucracy.
2 - Your average chemical industry is a much worse hazard than a nuke, yet you don't see protests to close them. Specially a terrorist attack on a large chlorine / fluorine tank will kill people by the boatloads if those tanks are within a few miles of a large population, yet the worse, most stupid nuclear accident to ever happen (that will never happen again) Chernobyl killed just one hundred people from direct radiation exposure (several thousands got cancer), but if Chernobyl had the most basic secondary containment structure present in every nuke in a developed country (and most developing countries too), Chernobyl wouldn't be much worse than three mile island (zero radiation deaths, no cancer cases attributed to that event).
Double standard anyone ? The real question is if the environmentalists actually cared about saving the environment, they would go after the true targets, which are coal burning, the most hazardous chemical industries and oil burning. Instead they go after the good guy, cause nukes have prevented millions of deaths due to billions of tons of coal that weren't burned instead, so even if you consider all nuclear tests, the WWII detonations over Japan, and the worse case, most absurd studies on cancer deaths due to all nuclear accidents, still nukes are safer than coal by at least 2 orders of magnitude, and safer than natural gas by at least one order (the deep horizon accident was a natural gas explosion, and if you add up all natural gas related deaths, there are close to one hundred per year worldwide).
My conclusion is, there are no honestly anti nuclear environmentalists, they are all in cahoots with the oil lobby, because they know that solar and wind won't displace home heating, and that electric vehicles will take 15 years before they are 20% of new cars produced (and 30 years before they are 50% of the operating car fleet, best case).
Do you know that many anti nuclear folks in youtube are also climate change denialists ? I tried to argue with a few of them. My login is the same of slashdot and youtube, if you bother you can find the posts.
Finally, I point you one guy that has lots of $$$ (a billion of them) reasons to be anti nuke, Elon Musk, the guy is the largest shareholder of Solar City, yet if you search, you will see him saying the US should be building more nukes. Because he's a true environmentalist that is actually spearheading the electric car revolution.
0,28 EUR, so 0,40 USD. Still much higher than USA electricity. I'm paying R$ 0,47/kWh / EUR 0,14/kWh (all included), tax burden on electricity production in Brazil is 50%.
Thorium fueled reactors exist. But in North America and Europe there are no molten salt reactors operating (regardless of nuclear fuel). I believe China has a molten salt mock reactor (testing the chemical properties of the coolant salt, the plumbing, the pumping, everything but the actual nuclear fission).
But LFTR means Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (a type of MSR), specifically one that has integral processing facility, it gets fuel online as well as fission products also get removed online (no downtime requirements) and it's waste is mostly fission products (using at least 99% of the Thorium nuclear potential, compared to all solid fuel reactors that use no more than 1% of the original fuel energy, leaving 99% material unfissioned).
There are some advantages to Thorium solid fueled water cooled reactors (like the one operating in Germany) versus uranium and/or plutonium fueled water cooled ones, but the advantages are tiny (perhaps burn 1,5% of nuclear material instead of 0,5-1% for uranium fueled) plus a small safety margin (higher fuel melting point), but LFTR offer 200 times better fuel utilization (less nuclear material mined), radically better safety margins (as the fuel is molten with the coolant, it can be easily drained into a passive shutdown configuration, it's walk away safe, no computers or human intervention required, manual shut down is just stopping a small fan to melt the salt plug (so the core fluid goes into the drain pan, including the nuclear fuel). The salt plug + drain pan is only possible on molten fuel reactors.
The GOP is a mix of:
Tea Party loonies that want to destroy the federal government, while they reign terror on economic interests that don't support them at the state level (like Tesla)
Religious fundamentalists which want to dictate their views on health, society relationships (very anti libertarian of them)
Libertarian which really means my rights are more important than yours
Your common republicans which are pro war, defend massive wasteful expenditures in the military regardless of actual need (huge federal government), have always been in love with every invasion of privacy made in the name of national security (but wouldn't mind selling those secrets for a lot of money to their friends in the private sector)
A smashing minority of common sense politicians which genuinely want to reform the tax code, want a smarter/smaller military, are willing to make bipartidarism work, want less entitlements, AKA, Republicans In Name Only
This is my very last reply. You will never accept the aspect where you are wrong, which is the real cost of nuclear, wind and solar.
My goal is to inform others. I have nothing further to add, no matter would you try to argue. Here's my final shot.
German eletricity cost: US$ 0,46 / kWh
American electricity cost: US$ 0,23 / kWh
I was just watching on Charlie Rose / Bloomberg TV an interview with Laurence Fink, Chairman and CEO of BlackRock, that they have two large datacenters, established right by two american hydro dams, and they buy electricity for US$ 0,03 / kWh.
Just because Brazil could invest massively on Solar and Wind, the simple fact is those investments don't add up like the Green claim.
There are no true 100% green oriented "smart policies", it's really about giving billions to Siemens, Westinghouse, GE, Hitachi, British lords, German billionaire investors, plus a jobs program (for all the extra workers needed to inspect wind turbines). Take the subsidies off and those projects crash.
Brazil has an extremely capable grid. We transfer tens of GWs for thousands of Kms. That makes sense for large hydro. It doesn't for electricity that costs 10x more.
Thorium LFTR a "paper technology", humm, the core reactor characteristics have been demonstrated before I was born (I'm 41 BTW). The critical features outside the core are chemical challenges that good chemists could solve with a few dozen year-man effort. perhaps pessimisticly a US$ 10 billion problem to do the first research reactor, finalize commercial design, get the production line ready. Nobody is saying they can make LFTR happen in 1 year, but instead 2-3 years for a small scale research reactor and less than 10 years for the production line working. But there's zero point in doing this unless we get the nuclear paranoia out of people's heads. Unfortunately mankind waited until the scientists from the Thorium project at ORNL were all dead or getting senile before we tried to revive this tech.
Thorium is essentially free fuel, cause it's an "undesirable" byproduct of rare earth mining, since we don't use it. There are dozen of rare earth mines that would each one produce as much thorium yearly than the whole world would need if it converted 100% of worldwide electricity production (and electrified 100% of the car fleet), and still replace 100% of fossil demand left from H2O + CO2 + a lot of heat (about 5000 tons per year, we could easily produce 100k tons per year). They can't operate cause the US EPA qualifies thorium as something dangerous, when you can put a 50g pellet of thorium in your pocket for years, and nothing will happen to you. I know because I sunbathed all summer long from age 9-19 in Thorium rich sands, primarily in a city known an Brazil's "city of health", people go to those sands for its therapeutic characteristics, exactly because of Thorium, Uranium and Radium. It's called Guarapari, and it's featured in Pandora's Promise.
I said before Brazil electricity demand is close to 200GW, I was wrong, it's close to 100GW. Germany is 70GW. But 20 years from now Brazil is likely to need 150GW, and perhaps Germany will be 80GW tops.
Brazil is an interesting case of how you can do electricity investments are done on a purely economical basis. And guess what, we're building 2 huge hydro dams (with combined power similar to our largest hydro plant, Itaipu), that dam is 2000Km away from it's largest consumption base, but it's still very much cheap electricity. We're building our 3rd nuclear station, about 1/10th the electricity production than the dam, but it's in a central location, a few hundred Kms from the 3 largest metro areas in Brazil, and we're now planning to build 5 or so new nuclear sites in the edge of the largest metro areas in Brazil (still in planning stages).
Our total solar + wind generation installed capacity is less than our smallest nuclear (660MWe). We have been building lots of gas thermal plants to make up in between.
If you remove all the political / protest hurdles from nucl
Do you work for an ISP or a Carrier ?
Provisioning ratios are still in the range of 20Kbps to 500Kbps per broadband user.
Back in the 1.5Mbps ADSL times, ISPs provisioned on a 18:1 ratio, so 85Kbps per user.
Even as speeds increased to 10 to 50Mbps, bandwidth consumption didn't scale, so I bet those 50Mbps broadbands are provisioned at about 200Kbps per user or less (50:1 easy).
Users don't download all at once.
Most users don't do torrent.
The bulk of today's links are still 10Gbps. 100Gbps isn't very common yet.
Links = DWDM tributaries. Either 1Gbps, 10Gbps, 40Gbps or 100Gbps (assuming all ethernet).
There is a lot of 10/40 Gbps aggregation using WDM (less than 16 channels).
You only see that kind of DWDM aggregation between metroplexes.
I would bet Verizon don't need more than a single 100Gbps (or 10 x 10Gbps WDM) from Seattle to San Francisco for instance, or from Phoenix to LA.
Of course if the Phoenix to LA fiber comes from DFW, then you're likely to carry all in the same fiber cable, but not necessarily on the same strand.
Long distance fiber cables are 36 to 144 fiber strands. Do you use a single strand using a pretty expensive system or use multiple strands (concentrating only the really long range traffic on the DWDM system). Cheaper (less strand) cable too small difference.
Just because tech exists, it doesn't mean carriers are using it.
Most optical tributaries in the world use only bi-di WDM (TX and RX on the same strand) or even no WDM (two strands for a single link).
More overseas fibers also don't use 100Gbps tributaries yet. Regeneration equipment (deep underwater) needs to be replaced to upgrade.
And routers with only support for 10Gbps are way cheaper than 100Gbps capable ones.
I worked for a small carrier that served a dozen small ISPs with 3Gbps, estimated about 50k users downstream, not your 10Mbps plus users, but still all Mbps plus service. That was last year. I estimate 100% of Brazil's bandwidth to North America and Europe fits in 100 10Gbps links easy. 100 million users. One DWDM system would take care of everything. Of course internal bandwidth is more than that.
In Brazil the three largest national backbone carriers reject peering from anyone but the 10 largest other backbone carriers (not an exact number, but a list of rules that reject all but the pretty big ones). Foreign backbones also reject peering, but that makes a little more sense (I'll peer with you in Miami, but not in Brazil, otherwise I'm giving you a free link to my customers abroad, in Brazil I sell links).
Their strategy is if they reject peering (as a cartel), chances are fifty/fifty the other side will have to buy a link from one of them. But in practice the other large carriers that do peer openly end up getting that business.
We have a huge IXP in Sao Paulo (the largest metroplex in the country). Most medium ISPs and almost all content providers are present at the Sao Paulo IXP and peer. Its not really a single IXP, but rather 10 points of presence connected directly by 10 or 100 Gbps links. Connect to one POP and you're connected to everybody.
Maybe the USA is regressing to a cartel of the largest boys peer, but anyone a bit smaller is left out. Troubling.
Verizon uses Level 3 or Qwest to get to AWS ?
Insane. Get off Verizon. Don't go back, ever. I know, impossible. Sorry.
I'm from Brazil. I thought Verizon was a nationwide carrier, are they ? Only small/medium ISPs do that.
The possibility is AWS isn't large enough to have carrier status. So Verizon don't want to peer (they want AWS to buy bandwidth) but they might have peering agreements with L3 and/or Qwest. And L3 and Qwest certainly have peering status with Verizon. So they follow the cheapest route.
But a carrier as large as Verizon should have tens of Gbps of bandwidth to exchange with AWS (considering just netflix being hosted at AWS). More than enough to peer.
Anyhow, this just shows that Verizon is punishing their customers by not doing direct peering. That part I can say without further information. They are bartering their customer bandwidth demand for ransom with AWS / Netflix. There might not be explicit throttling, they just throw that bandwidth through an already congested link.
I'm sure Netflix would be willing to pay fair backbone costs. But Verizon wants to profit from it instead. This has been extremely well documented between Netflix and Comcast. Netflix offered to peer at Comcast regional centers. But Comcast considers Netflix revenues made using Comcast customers to be something they are entitled to profit from as well (directly from Netflix).
The reality is today's routers and fiber networks are one thousand times faster than 1995 at the same cost (from 155Mbps to 100Gbps). And price is dropping constantly.
They can save more money by dropping Cisco/Juniper and going open source than trying to throttle anything.
Trying to throttle 100Gbps backbone links is like trying to drink from a firehose. They should only throttle bandwidth they pay per Gbps (international links).
Internet Exchange Points.
If you are a customer of a large nationwide ISP accessing a large content provider present in the same country, you aren't going to have to go through any 3rd parties, as your ISP will exchange traffic at the closest IXP (directly). There around 50 IXPs in the USA alone. Many Hundreds worldwide.
So the theory that the problem is elsewhere doesn't sound very credible.
If they have trouble connecting to the closest IXP, in all likelyhood you'll see a broad slowdown.
I know a thing or two about this. I'm an expert on this stuff.
In all likelyhood, it is Verizon throttling AWS so they can charge a premium to keep their traffic unthrottled.
To be pessimistic 80% of US ISP bandwidth is the result of direct peering between two ISPs or and ISP and the data center where content is hosted (or mirrored). The fiber cable where data passes might be leased (extremely likely), worst case having a large L2 ethernet switch from the IXP between the two side's border routers.
Yes your grid is fine. Except for the extra cost for this exotic experiment. You're paying so much for electricity this little experiment of Germany is un applicable to the developing world. Heck, it's uneconomical even for the US (given the much longer transmission distances you need to move power from east to west coast). ... Your experiment has zero applicability to process heat, it's never produced from electricity because it's way too expensive. Maybe you can produce natural gas from biomass for process heat. But you will need huge qtys of biomass. That's a close as you can get to renewable process heat without a high temperature nuclear reactor (Thorium LFTR, the only reactor that can replace all fossil fuels because it can provide efficient electricity, process heat, desalinization, producing fuels and fertilizers directly from H2O and CO2). Conventional nuclear is limited at 350C, not nearly hot enough for direct process heat for most uses. At least twice that is necessary.
Like I was told when I got my privates pilots license, you can even get a barn to fly if you attach enough horsepower. It will just be extremely inefficient. That's the Germany electricity plan.
Climate change is a global problem. It needs global solutions. That begs for affordable solutions. Do you think China and India will adopt solutions they can't afford.
Germany's financially wasteful experiment only makes sense because you hate nuclear energy.
For the extra cost of your experiment over 20 years nuclear could clean up all of Europe's electrical grid.
Plus it's not like you're getting rid of coal anytime soon. That has to be the most important part of the plan. Stop all coal burning. All of it. If the plan is too expensive, then you can't quite do that. Next step is stop natural gas burning.
Oh, you need high temperature process heat as well, otherwise you can't have an oil refinery, petrochemical industry, steel production, fertilizer production,
Thorium LFTR provides a solution so efficient you can convert desert land into a green heaven (with sea water converted into fresh water in scales almost unlimited). And since it's no good for nuclear bombs, it never got the funding it deserves. But the countries that have the money to make it happen (and need it) will never fund it, because it will kill their cash cowl (oil production).
It's not a paper solution. The only reason it was partially tested in the 1960's and 1970's was because the US air force wanted a nuclear powered bombers before ICBMs were perfected. The test went all well as it could have been, with less than 5% of the funding of uranium/plutonium breeder reactors. But was shutdown after ICBMs were perfected, but Thorium isn't good for making bombs. Over half of the challenges with making Thorium reactors were shown to work fine, there were no failures, they just lacked the money to finish it. In total over 22000 hours of safe operation. That was what nuclear was supposed to be.
But even today's nuclear is safe, it gets expensive because people keep throwing political hurdles that increase cost. In countries that aren't anti nuclear, nuclear power is about the same cost as coal (like South Korea).
No I'm not giving up. I'm the rational equivalent of your typical anti-nuke activist that won't stop until he kills all nuclear stations in the world. But in my case, I'm pro economical solutions. Germany's solution is only economical because you're filthy rich and can afford it.
Before you tell me to take care of my own grid. Germany has been exporting anti nuclear sentiment to the rest of the world.
No wind and 5 km/h is the same, turbines output is speed cubed. Wind turbines need something like 20 Km/h to be producing serious energy.
0% or 5% capacity generation is just about the same.
I like wind for Brazil, we have 2000 Km of coastline with constant winds over 8,5m/s (30km/h) half the year, day and night. Exactly in the dry season when hydro dams aren't being replenished much. I think 30km/h would have wind turbines humming at over 60% capacity or so, that's a proper place for wind electricity.
A city I lived for 3 years as a kid was 5 degrees south latitude, so solar produces just about the same year round, the seasons basicly don't exist.
Where I live now minimum sunlight in the first winter day is still 10 hours. That is still a good day for Solar PV.
Do you have that level of consistency ?
Ok, not nights, evenings. You only need 40% of the load at 7PM ? I don't think so.
1 - The last really old plants (1950s designs) in the world was decommissioned almost 15 years ago, the ones operating in Germany were decommissioned even earlier. Nuclear power was only widely deployed in the mid 1960s, before that were only demonstration/research/plutonium making reactors, producing so little electricity they were shutdown in the late 70s.
2 - Your argument that is was decided 20 years ago to shutdown nuclear, with nuclear power bribing govt was more like the govt extorted more money from nuclear operator with higher taxes instead. Yes, public opinion in Germany is extremely anti-nuclear, which is unfortunate, since the best anti-nuclear argument is nuclear don't load follow (they should produce the cheapest electricity, and be operated around the clock instead).
3-Are you aware that average generation capacity of solar in the winter solstice (in German lattitudes) is about 1% (compared to 25% in the summer) ?
Solar PV in nov/dec/jan in Germany is less than 2GW at noon.
You export energy in a bright summer day, and import in a hot night in the summer and on windless days in the winter.
You're trying to mislead others pretending you don't depend on France and neighbor countries with large baseload sources to make up for what Germany today lacks in baseload generation capacity.
The current German plan is 100% contingent on importing energy often, and when you do export, it's due to overproduction, it's energy that must be dumped into neighbor countries (to avoid throwing it away).
I suggest you compare the net cost of those exports and imports. It should be telling.
I do make mistakes but I'm learning, you aren't going to see me repeating wrong data like many environmentalists do everyday in their anti-nuclear speeches.
Thanks for the data, your information is interesting. You do make me feel a little bad for hitting you with this, but I'm scared shitless from climate change.
6 pointer earthquakes are a non issue for nukes. It's the 7.5+ pointer ones that actually are trouble. Specially the 8.0 plus (the strongest ones you see in the Ring of Fire). You know that from a 6 to an 8 pointer there's 100 times increase in energy ?
Nukes secondary containment structures have extremely solid steel+concrete structures (as strong as one meter of solid steel), and they are only needed in case of a meltdown/rupture of internal core plumbing, so only extreme tornadoes are any risk, and even then a small one (except for Chernobyl style nukes, which there are none in any serious democracies, developed or not, Chernobyl didn't have that, I believe that even former USSR states got rid of all of them after Chernobyl).
Water cooled nuclear isn't load following, but fluid fuel nukes are (Thorium LFTR and IFR). Germany could take that extra energy and pump water back into dams, produce hydrogen (fuel cell cars are starting mass production in 2014, although I like Elon Musk's statement that they are fool cells, except when you have enormous electricity surplus you could use to produce hydrogen from them, producing hydrogen from natural gas is an environmental stupidity).
Specially interesting is Thorium LFTR technology, because they can operate at 700C (with possibility of higher temp designs), which is hot enough to run many industrial processes that otherwise would burn natural gas (or petrol/coal if natural gas is unavailable). For instance, an Oil refinery typically burns natural gas to produce process heat for refining fuels. That gas could otherwise be used to power cars or heat homes. Canada tar sands production is looking into high temperature nuclear to power their filthy oil extraction from tar sands processes (so they can export their gas to Japan). Process heat is also needed to produce fertilizers, run petrochemical processes (like producing plastic/nylon/...). This could also be used to directly produce renewable fuels from H2O + CO2 (directly replacing gasoline and diesel). I'm yet to see a case of high temperature process heat from solar directly (doing this from electricity would be extremely inefficient).
One smart thing the Germans could do is a 160Km/h speed limit (trying to propose something that's still faster than speed limits elsewhere) on the Autobahns. Not because of safety but because of emissions. Just electronically ticket those going faster, so that the rich can keep going at 250Km/h, but charge enough money to get most people driving below the limit. But I reckon this would be like trying to take machine guns away from the US rednecks, there would be a revolt if someone tried to do it.
Scrubbers on coal are positive, they remove the sulfur and other poisonous emissions, but the CO2 is still going out. I just found out those brand new plants emit 300Kg CO2 per second at peak load, or 4,7 million tons of CO2 per year if they are operated on average at 50% load capacity. That's 4,7 billion tons of CO2 yearly for one thousand of those (assuming they operate at a low capacity factor of 50%, in tandem with lots of wind and solar). You really need to look at the volume of coal a power plant burns, even the most efficient ones. An entire train filled with coal (like 150 wagons) every week.
Germany turning off nuclear has already elicited responses from the Indians and Chinese that if they can do that, then they don't need to go nuclear quite as fast (keep burning coal), but their plants don't have scrubbers, don't use ultra efficient combined cycle turbines, and China is still starting up a few new coal power plants every month, and they aren't nearly as clean as Germany's. You clean up your coal, USA is migrating from Coal to Natu
I'm trying to find those 1950s reactors recently shutdown, nothing yet.
I'm all for shutting down very old nuclear power plants, but with a plan to replace them. Specially on earthquake prone areas. Japan isn't the best place for nukes.
I've never heard of earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis in Germany, it looks like nuclear perfect land. Except for the radical greens that hate nuclear much more than they hate greenhouse gases. I looks much more of a cold war reaction, a fear of WWIII, than an honest fear of nuclear power. Nuclear weapons have this effect on people.
What Germany has done with Solar and Wind is nothing but amazing, really good.
But what happens on very cold winter nights when there's zero wind ? Germany consumes more electricity in the winter than in the summer.
If Germany can produce it's electricity with renewables alone (without nuclear) it will be awesome, but please shutdown coal before nuclear.
If those plants were unsafe, they would have been shutdown before Fukushima.
It was a knee jerk reaction.
Nuclear reactors have enormous safety margins, and they have maintenance procedures that allow to keep them running for a long time, much like aircraft can. The big difference in older aircraft have higher fuel consumption (and petrol is always getting more expensive), nuclear power plants don't have the same issue.
Ok, so I exaggerated, but so did you, all nuclear reactors built even in the 1960s have been decommissioned for at least 15 years.
And Germany did built a few lignite burning coal power plants recently. Lignite is one of the dirtiest coal types of them all.
The anti-nuclear people cherry pick any nuclear project failure / cost overrun, and paint it as the most common scenario.
Just as dishonest as the climate change deniers that cherry pick the studies that favor them, branding everything else as hoax or dishonest.
PS: I'm not a fan of water cooled nuclear reactors, aka 95% of the reactors in operation in the world. They work and are safe, but we need something much better. But saying no to nuclear is a dumb idea. Solar have a very interesting advantage that it can be installed in tiny increments and come online very quickly. Wind is a little slower, but anything that provides baseload power is a large, heavy, complex power plant that takes time to build (hydro, nuclear, coal, natural gas, geothermal). I'm yet to see someone discuss non nuclear renewables with nuclear rationally (except for a single youtube discussion by canadians, even then the anti nuclear side did rehashed a few nonsensical arguments, at least he was civil and the debate wasn't a series of one side interrupting the other).
The same Germany that decided to shutdown all nuclear power, and is now burning more coal than ever ?
I guess all the education wasn't good enough then.
Our enemy number one should be coal and petrol.
Enemy number two natural gas.
Once we can get rid of 90% of coal and petrol, and at least 75% of natural gas, then you can think about nuclear, not the other way around.
Nuclear is safer than coal. Much safer.
Coal burning releases uranium, thorium, arsenic and sulfur into the atmosphere.
A nuclear plant releases far less radiation into the environment.
Have you seen an ash pile from a coal power plant ?
Please watch on you tube, search for "coal ash spill" "coal ash disaster"