Unfortunately thats the ideal situation that does not apply to the real world. In reactor design economics trumps good engineering. Besides we've had this conversation before regarding nuclear industry recommendations for improving reactor design. But since you have provided me with an opportunity to address the points you left me with before;
Boy you dug up an old conversation. Had to go reread to figure out what you were talking about.
So you've had plenty of time to visit your safe deposit box and it was on your mind - what did the insurance paper say?
Sorry - wasn't on my mind last time I visited my box. Don't exactly visit it frequently. My mind isn't actually always on nuclear power. More about getting more checks or putting more paperwork in then getting back to work on time.
All we need to know is that it is some number greater than zero. (accident rate with post TMI/Chernobyl designs)
Actually, we do. It's not good science otherwise. Indeed, by that philosophy we shouldn't have technology at all - there's always the chance of another Bhopal, car accident, whatever. We KNOW the approximate accident rate for oil, and it kinda sucks. The accident rate for nuclear is lower.
No. I meant exactly what I said wrt a burner reactor.
You weren't talking about a burner reactor back then.
But not at another generations expense, especially if they cannot expend energy at the same rate that we've been able to. Are you telling me you are more concerned with your comfort? If we don't have the balls to deal with the shit fight we've created then we have no business even running nuclear reactors. Accept responsibility, deal with the shit so we can move on
Like I said: address the pollution problems NOW. Pollution is also something that we'll be passing off on our kids. Also, by reports nuclear can be useful for the 10ks of years; leaving coal and oil and other resources for future generations.
But not at another generations expense, especially if they cannot expend energy at the same rate that we've been able to. Are you telling me you are more concerned with your comfort? If we don't have the balls to deal with the shit fight we've created then we have no business even running nuclear reactors. Accept responsibility, deal with the shit so we can move on
I was anticipating rather more extensive rebuilds than you were, apparently.
It's not possible to rebuild these plants.
Sure it is. Just look at home remodeling in Florida - you knock down all but 1 wall, build a new house around that wall, call it a remodeled house.;)
It's possible to return a nuclear site to a more or less 'green' state with enough money and effort. Ergo it's possible to shortcircuit this process somewhere on the way and build a new nuclear plant on the same site. Probably cheaper as well.
So improve the design of the AP-1000 so it's even *less* likely to have an accident than it's current design. It's a totally reasonable thing to expect if the industry was more concerned with safety than economics.
2.47 x 10^-7 translates to 2.47 accidents, on average EVERY 10 MILLION YEARS. I've had risk management training(military). We try to be very safe; but at some point we acknowledge that it's 'safe enough' having to wait over a million reactor years before you get an accident seems good enough.
'core damage frequency' doesn't even turn into Chernobyl - TMI would also fall into this. It translates into 'write the reactor off, most likely', but assuming you have secondary containment (all US reactors DO, and I'm certainly not aruging against this), it's not yet Chernobyl.
Well I expect that the industry Panel that created those recommendations has engineers that are more th
Reread his post: 'tax credit subsidies that ANY business gets'.
For example there are tax subsidies you can get for building a 'green' office building. It might sound odd, but having piles of cash around, as well as offices all over the place the oil industry is in a prime position to build or remodel their offices to be green.
If subsidies like that are part of the study they shouldn't really be, as they apply to any business - Ford, IBM, Cisco, Pepsi, Sears, Walmart, JCPenny, the local toolshop, whatever. In addition to the oil companies. They also get subsidies for improving their environmental protections.
Such subsidies are dwarfed by the taxes they pay.
Meanwhile Germany leads in Solar - but that's because Germany has mandated that the electricity companies buy any solar power on the order of 70-80 cents per kwh. That's like 8x what I pay per kwh.
Pushing reset results in visible screen changes. You can both have firmware fake a reset in that case or have the cheating system embedded into the firmware.
If the calculator won't reset, then they're either going to do a closer check for cheat stuff or just not let you have the calculator(hope you brought a backup!).
Personally? I tend to use my BB to read email, mostly. Don't even bother to download images normally. A 400 comment in slashdot is pretty huge, on average.
Just looked it on some of my bill - I seem to average just under 30 Meg a month, 1 meg a day. If I can use a computer, I use a computer. I'm not watching youtube videos on it.
Most any college team I know of (SEC ones in my experience) MAKE the universities money by the barrel full.
Well, you have to beware of creative accounting and bad investments/contracts.
Basically it can sometimes become a 'school pride' issue, because the sports teams 'make' the college money they press for additional benefits - more pay for the coach, more money for recruiting efforts, new stadium, etc...
Of course, all this is justified as 'payoff in X years', the problem is that you never reach X...
On the creative accounting side you end up with sports expenses not being counted as part of the sports programs, things like ticket sales being counted as income even as they count stadium expenses as 'infrastructure' like actual classrooms.
Sure, it's possible to improve on them. That's why I put 'fully developed' in quotes. But they're both still mature technologies in other industries.
By 'fully developed' I mean more that you're looking at price drops below inflation, say, 1%, not higher than 10% like what you'd more expect from a developing technology.
It sounds like you're making the mistake of believing the level of technology we have today is the limit to human innovation.
I do somewhat believe this, in that I believe that we've found most of the 'easy answers'. Basically, in order for solar to become economically cheaper, molten salt is unlikely to be the answer. I'm not saying the answer isn't out there, but that the current solution isn't likely to evolve into a practical one without a couple of other breakthrough technologies. What form those could take I won't say - cheaper mirrors, cheaper control systems, auto-morphing(cheap) mirrors, robotic construction, heck even just automated construction of 'smart' sub-assemblies so you can practically just toss them off a truck and they'll line themselves up.
I'm not saying you're guilty of this, but I hear constantly from certain people the notion that we shouldn't consider solar energy because the technology for solar energy is somehow insufficient, assuming that unlike every area of human endeavor, there won't be further advances.
I judge each project on it's own merits; my reservations for this solar system was confined to THIS style of implimentation. If they can make project #5 for 1/3rd the cost of this one, great, install them all over. From the descriptions though I don't see avenues for savings that great.
That's because Germany has long have had an anti-nuclear stance, while actively promoting solar energy. Even they are reconsidering on keeping nuclear plants open for a longer time, in the wake of economic realities.
I think that 'actively promoting it' is understating the issue.
Homes and businesses earn a government-guaranteed price of as much as 47 euro cents ($0.74) for each kilowatt-hour of solar power they generate, The country has trimmed subsidized prices by 5 percent a year from about 1 euro per kilowatt-hour nine years ago to spur the industry to control expenses and improve efficiency.
I think it was Italy that they found a 'solar' site running generators at night to earn more money...
The components that will benefit the most from mass production are the heliostats and parabolic trough assemblies. They are not currently mass produced. Each site requires thousands or more of identical units.
But their design is known, ergo it's simply an engineering problem to figure out approximately how much automation is possible, how much said automation would cost, and what production levels would be necessary to justify said automation. Take it backwards, when X is at 'Thousands' of production per year, Y automation is justified, resulting in Z cost. Increase X to 'Millions', 10Y automation is justified, resuling in z/5 cost. Or maybe it's z/2, I don't know, you end up with a lot of variables.
Solar thermal also faces some other problems - they have huge footprints for the power, need to be placed in the highest sun areas, making putting them away from people best, but you still need to run powerlines to them, which can add millions.
Given the level of subsidization green energy gets, including solar, I'd be working hard to automate/build a collector factory because if I can undersell everyone else I stand to make boatloads of money.
Those german salt mines were supposed to be safe when then put the waste in there. Only a few dozen years later they were proven wrong. (Please check the facts on this one, not your believes)
Hmmm... Sigmar Gabriel, Germany's environment minister, has called the mine "the most problematic nuclear facility in Europe." "The standards that were set [in the early days of Asse II] would be completely unacceptable today," American salt storage facilities are generally in better shape. James Conca, a geophysicist at New Mexico State University,
Same problem happen in yucca: can you granantee it still is safe in 100 years? And what if the operator goes bankrupt in 50 years, what will the state of yucca be 100 years later? That is a long period!
I can guarantee nothing, but I'd be perfectly willing to take a bet with long odds of a leak. The odds, even now, of Yucca leaking was in the eons, not centuries. As for the operator; that was the Federal government, and as long as our 'no reprocessing' requirement was in place I want the waste stored in a way we can get to it. After all, it's still got valuable fissile material in there!
And because you are talking about glassified waste it is high energy waste, but don' forget there also is a multiple of low radiation waste (gloves, pipes of the centra) that needs to be taken out of the biosfere for a long period.
I wasn't talking about glassification, that was Chibi. Still, as long as we're on the topic; part of the beauty of glassification is that you can even do it with the gloves and the pipes and such.
Honestly enough, it doesn't even 'need' to be taken out of the biosphere for that long. There are a lot of chemicals that are released that is deadlier by the pound or gallon than low level nuclear waste.
You are forgetting that every part of a solar thermal plant can be mass produced from relatively inexpensive basic materials.
No, I'm not. Matter of fact, my assessment DEPENDS on them using 'relatively inexpensive basic materials'. IE the reason I don't think costs will drop enough to make it economic is that you're not looking at insanely expensive special components becoming far cheaper. You're already looking at developed components that are almost as economic as they can get.
Which specific components do you propose becoming an order of magnitude cheaper?
Off the top of my head:
Mirrors, motors, supports. Salt, Solar concentrator, piping, pumps, and turbine. Steam system. Salt reservoir.
Fairly standard industrial computer control system, customized for solar application.
Areas for good drop in price - the control system, possibly the concentrator. The steam system/turbine might be optimizable, but I don't see it dropping an order of magnitude. The Salt might get a bit cheaper if we start installing enough solar for a dedicated supply industry to form and specialize/automate.
Once mass production parts become available, it is pretty much reduced to contractors leveling the site and placement of equipment.
There's engineering costs to 'leveling' a site, and I'm not sure we want to 'level' sites the size of solar farms all over the place. There's drainage, erosion, and other issues invovled when you do stuff like that.
Not having one-off solar plants will help a LOT with engineering costs, but they're only one leg of three.
Call me a pessimist, but mirrors and motors are already 'fully developed' in non-solar applications. It's like electric cars. Hardly anything in an EV is unique to EVs, so we are able to come up with good cost estimates. Sure, the prototypes and initial runs will be more expensive, but that's true of any vehicle.
Automation would be good, it's just the question becomes one of 'can it be 3X-5X as good?'.
mainly transporting the existing spent fuel - Is that really a problem?(potentially NSFW due to language)
We pretty much have the 'transportation' issue cracked. When you're producing like 1 traincar a year worth of waste, you can get rather silly with containment.
Newsflash - we don't need 30 years to solve the transport issue, we've already HAD the 30 years.
demolishing a decommissioned nuclear reactor has not successfully been performed safely on a large scale yet. Nuclear industry proponents tout the amount of energy that can be extracted from a gram of Uranium but rarely factor the *Net Energy Return* of the Nuclear fuel cycle, associated infrastructure and the long term storage of toxic waste.
Except for the first, these seems to be the lemons of nuclear power plants. Thing is, plants that weren't lemons aren't the ones being shut down.
For example Diablo Canyon helped replace Rancho Seco, and has busted capacity factor/reliability standards.
It's also a newer plant. Basically, that's the problem with saying there's all sorts of trouble with nuclear reacters - sure, they have to be done right, but it's certainly possible and we have 30 years of experience telling us what to look out for. New reactor designs are safer AND less complicated - complication adds expense and cuts into reliability.
Look at cars, realize that you're practically looking at Model-Ts for safety/reliability statistics when we're looking to build a Civic.
What's up with that picture? I mean, they just piled the drums up that haphazardly? The plans I saw for the USA would have had the drums at least stacked nicely. Still, it's a storage site for low to medium waste - I'm sure some of those barrels contain some neat(if mildly radioactive) stuff...
Concerns about the area filling with water and contaminating the water supply? I wonder how realistic they are. Germans are reportably fairly nuclear-phobic.
Personally, the last statement makes me lose a lot of my respect for them: "Having dropped below nuclear power, solar power is now one of the least expensive energy sources in America." I also question their data points - seeing as how they go out into the 2020s
Wind has reportably been cheaper than solar for quite some time.
Insurance also is such a factor. the first 10 Billion (US situation) is insured by the plants, anything over that would be paid by taxes. Compare that to the cost of Chernobyl ( ~ 235 Billion) or 3 mile island (close to a billion).
First question: What sources are you using for Chernobyl? Second: What year dollars are you using?
TMI isn't as big of a deal - $1B is 'only' around double to triple the cost of decommisioning a reactor that hasn't melted down.
On Price-Anderson: It's acctually around $8.9B for an accident; because of the way Price-Anderson is structured, increasing the number of plants will increase the cap.
Currently Lloyd's charges around $400k/year for $300M of coverage.
Consider the gulf spill, Bhopal, etc... Is there any disaster in the billions where the government doesn't get involved?
I mean, TMI was comfortably contained within the cap, and the Chernobyl plant would have never been allowed to operate in the USA.
BP hasn't managed to bust the cap yet for the gulf oil spill yet, $4B thus far, so they might still manage to.
Still, we're talking about a major, major oil spill here. Increasing Price-Anderson levels might be good, but as you mention, hydro power can carry similar risks - imagine a New Orleans with tens of thousands potentially dead.
The question becomes one of how much risk is there, really? I mean, Chernobyl wasn't even encased in a containment dome, all US reactors have them. TMI DID have a dome - look at the cost difference. $1B vs $200B. TMI happened earlier than Chernobyl and has influenced design decisions since then. We've run simulations involving ramming the domes with a plane - it's a lot like what happens if you run an airliner into the hoover dam - there's a big difference between a concrete pressure vessel and a building.
In the end, I don't want 100% nuclear, but I do want it to be part of the solution. My theoretical mix is something like 40% nuclear(1), 15% hydro(2), 15% wind, 15% solar, 15% 'other'. You use the hydro to help balance out the wind/solar.
1: double that of today 2: Because our hydro power is already around maxed
Sure, the price may drop, but will it drop enough?
I tend to divide this stuff into three categories: Engineering/design, materials, and labor.
I don't see molten salt tech gaining major cuts in materials and labor. You still have to put down the mirrors, make the motors, run control/power lines, build the turbine, aquire all the salt, etc...
Engineering cost should go down, but will it go down an order of magnitude? Likely not.
You'd have to get the plant down in cost to the point it produces power for more like 6 cents a kwh, not 16.
In the case of a small business, this would mean finding a workable solution, that could be a ramp or could be a small staircase elevator, or could be having a call button that calls a couple of employees to lift the wheelchair user into the store.
'Small staircase elevator'? That's cheaper than a ramp?
I think what you're not understanding is that when you have a small company that might net $30k/year or less in profits, enough to support a family but not much else, it doesn't take much litigation to bankrupt them. You also don't necessarily get the best legal representation to be able to win those hardship waivers.
Who knows, maybe they could of won an exemption with the town for being in a 'historical building', maybe they could have made a deal with the guy in the wheelchair, maybe the guy in the wheelchair was just looking for money(it happens).
If he was looking for money paid to him to go away, well, he picked a poor target, but he doesn't care, and he's the least likely to work with them on a 'we'll work on a creative solution for whenever you come by'. He's going to want the 100% ADA solution, and money for him pointing it out.
Heh, your mentioning a button to call somebody out to assist him up the steps reminded me of when I proposed 'NRA Airlines', where you get a discount for open carry. Can't use the terminal, so no security checks other than a quick check for bombs, which would be done by retired(but still with good noses) military bomb dogs. Handicapped passengers would be assisted onto the plane by men with such names as 'Hans' and 'Franz'.
There are many different solutions that are possible, and as we know, there are still many businesses that don't have staircases.
True, but the ADA depends on lawsuits for enforcement, for the most part, thus they're just one lawsuit that's not even necessarily from a handicapped person away from major expenses.
Frankly, if adding a little staircase elevator or having a ramp or finding another solution was so expensive that it put the store out of business, I think maybe this guy's business problems were a little bigger than he described them.
Certainly running a bit close to the wire, but then, most small town small businesses ARE.
If the store had been in operation for two generations, then the ADA rules did not exist when they "built the place."
Indeed, and the business may have been in there long before.
Personally, I'd lean on the 'reasonable' clause a lot in these cases. A simple study that shows implausibility should work - in this case a business that profits $50k/year and quote from 3 contractors saying '$250k to make it compliant because this is considered 'work' and therefore we have to also bring A, B, and C up to 'code'.
Another funny thing - I remember reading that ADA rules increase the costs on apartments in NYC so much that it'd be cheaper to give them ALL free compliant apartments. Housing is already at a premium, and making something wheelchair compliant adds on something like 30% to the minimum space, plus makes the resulting kitchen(ette) LESS useful to non-handicapped.
You still have the issue that the wood used in homes isn't intended to be burned and that they shouldn't catch fire, especially if they're properly built to fire code standards.
As for metal roofs - they're gaining in popularity.
There are good reasons for Microsoft to call it a contract. It doesn't make it so, though. If you purchase a copy of Microsoft software from someone other than Microsoft, there is no privity of contract between you and Microsoft. Nor is there any consideration that passes between you and Microsoft.
This is why 'shrinkwrap EULAs' actually have a pretty bad enforcement record.
Judges tend not to look at it kindly when you're buying software that you can't return once opened* with a license hidden within that says 'return to the store for a refund if you don't agree with this'.
Especially when they say you're not buying a copy of the software, you're buying a license for it, with all these nasty one-sided terms, including such things as not offering replacement discs**, or making said discs more expensive than the software.
*Many stores in the USA won't take software returns, period, except for 'even exchange'. **After all, you're buying a license, not a physical copy.;)
And they don't even bother to orient them to the sun; being parallel to the street is considered to be more important. They're big piles of shit all around.
neighborhood design is a big issue and should be considered more carefully. Many homes are shitty all the way around, especially those 'McMansions' built during the boom. I think there needs to be a home grading system, a sort of house version of EPA gas mileage(though that metric has it's own problems).
As for the cooling towers and heat deflectors and all that, they DO add a substantial amount to the cost of a home and have limited ability to decrease the temperature. It'd work fine at moderate latitudes, for example I don't even have AC, do my 'cooling' via opening/closing windows and drawing air through my basement. But I'm pretty far north.
Basically, I think homes can be made a LOT more efficient economically, but a lot of greens are pushing uneconomical solutions.
For example, I wish that solar thermal heating via absorption chillers was around a third of it's price; but even now there are areas where one would pay itself off in 5-10 years.
Slashdot Mirror
So it's 5X, not 8X.
In reading I know that it used to be 1EU
Didn't notice it missing before I hit submit:
average of 13 people die per day in coal pits
Coal power in china is a dirty, nasty affair. Hope they do better with nuclear(and thus far they are).
Unfortunately thats the ideal situation that does not apply to the real world. In reactor design economics trumps good engineering. Besides we've had this conversation before regarding nuclear industry recommendations for improving reactor design. But since you have provided me with an opportunity to address the points you left me with before;
Boy you dug up an old conversation. Had to go reread to figure out what you were talking about.
So you've had plenty of time to visit your safe deposit box and it was on your mind - what did the insurance paper say?
Sorry - wasn't on my mind last time I visited my box. Don't exactly visit it frequently. My mind isn't actually always on nuclear power. More about getting more checks or putting more paperwork in then getting back to work on time.
All we need to know is that it is some number greater than zero. (accident rate with post TMI/Chernobyl designs)
Actually, we do. It's not good science otherwise. Indeed, by that philosophy we shouldn't have technology at all - there's always the chance of another Bhopal, car accident, whatever. We KNOW the approximate accident rate for oil, and it kinda sucks. The accident rate for nuclear is lower.
No. I meant exactly what I said wrt a burner reactor.
You weren't talking about a burner reactor back then.
But not at another generations expense, especially if they cannot expend energy at the same rate that we've been able to. Are you telling me you are more concerned with your comfort? If we don't have the balls to deal with the shit fight we've created then we have no business even running nuclear reactors. Accept responsibility, deal with the shit so we can move on
Like I said: address the pollution problems NOW. Pollution is also something that we'll be passing off on our kids. Also, by reports nuclear can be useful for the 10ks of years; leaving coal and oil and other resources for future generations.
But not at another generations expense, especially if they cannot expend energy at the same rate that we've been able to. Are you telling me you are more concerned with your comfort? If we don't have the balls to deal with the shit fight we've created then we have no business even running nuclear reactors. Accept responsibility, deal with the shit so we can move on
I was anticipating rather more extensive rebuilds than you were, apparently.
It's not possible to rebuild these plants.
Sure it is. Just look at home remodeling in Florida - you knock down all but 1 wall, build a new house around that wall, call it a remodeled house. ;)
It's possible to return a nuclear site to a more or less 'green' state with enough money and effort. Ergo it's possible to shortcircuit this process somewhere on the way and build a new nuclear plant on the same site. Probably cheaper as well.
So improve the design of the AP-1000 so it's even *less* likely to have an accident than it's current design. It's a totally reasonable thing to expect if the industry was more concerned with safety than economics.
2.47 x 10^-7 translates to 2.47 accidents, on average EVERY 10 MILLION YEARS. I've had risk management training(military). We try to be very safe; but at some point we acknowledge that it's 'safe enough' having to wait over a million reactor years before you get an accident seems good enough.
'core damage frequency' doesn't even turn into Chernobyl - TMI would also fall into this. It translates into 'write the reactor off, most likely',
but assuming you have secondary containment (all US reactors DO, and I'm certainly not aruging against this), it's not yet Chernobyl.
Well I expect that the industry Panel that created those recommendations has engineers that are more th
Reread his post: 'tax credit subsidies that ANY business gets'.
For example there are tax subsidies you can get for building a 'green' office building. It might sound odd, but having piles of cash around, as well as offices all over the place the oil industry is in a prime position to build or remodel their offices to be green.
If subsidies like that are part of the study they shouldn't really be, as they apply to any business - Ford, IBM, Cisco, Pepsi, Sears, Walmart, JCPenny, the local toolshop, whatever. In addition to the oil companies. They also get subsidies for improving their environmental protections.
Such subsidies are dwarfed by the taxes they pay.
Meanwhile Germany leads in Solar - but that's because Germany has mandated that the electricity companies buy any solar power on the order of 70-80 cents per kwh. That's like 8x what I pay per kwh.
Pushing reset results in visible screen changes. You can both have firmware fake a reset in that case or have the cheating system embedded into the firmware.
If the calculator won't reset, then they're either going to do a closer check for cheat stuff or just not let you have the calculator(hope you brought a backup!).
Personally? I tend to use my BB to read email, mostly. Don't even bother to download images normally. A 400 comment in slashdot is pretty huge, on average.
Just looked it on some of my bill - I seem to average just under 30 Meg a month, 1 meg a day. If I can use a computer, I use a computer. I'm not watching youtube videos on it.
I'm not saying this happens to ALL colleges, just that I've seen it happen to some.
I've also seen high schools go completely bonkers for this stuff - things like 4 gyms, but no library, auditorium, or music hall.
Most any college team I know of (SEC ones in my experience) MAKE the universities money by the barrel full.
Well, you have to beware of creative accounting and bad investments/contracts.
Basically it can sometimes become a 'school pride' issue, because the sports teams 'make' the college money they press for additional benefits - more pay for the coach, more money for recruiting efforts, new stadium, etc...
Of course, all this is justified as 'payoff in X years', the problem is that you never reach X...
On the creative accounting side you end up with sports expenses not being counted as part of the sports programs, things like ticket sales being counted as income even as they count stadium expenses as 'infrastructure' like actual classrooms.
Sure, it's possible to improve on them. That's why I put 'fully developed' in quotes. But they're both still mature technologies in other industries.
By 'fully developed' I mean more that you're looking at price drops below inflation, say, 1%, not higher than 10% like what you'd more expect from a developing technology.
It sounds like you're making the mistake of believing the level of technology we have today is the limit to human innovation.
I do somewhat believe this, in that I believe that we've found most of the 'easy answers'. Basically, in order for solar to become economically cheaper, molten salt is unlikely to be the answer. I'm not saying the answer isn't out there, but that the current solution isn't likely to evolve into a practical one without a couple of other breakthrough technologies. What form those could take I won't say - cheaper mirrors, cheaper control systems, auto-morphing(cheap) mirrors, robotic construction, heck even just automated construction of 'smart' sub-assemblies so you can practically just toss them off a truck and they'll line themselves up.
I'm not saying you're guilty of this, but I hear constantly from certain people the notion that we shouldn't consider solar energy because the technology for solar energy is somehow insufficient, assuming that unlike every area of human endeavor, there won't be further advances.
I judge each project on it's own merits; my reservations for this solar system was confined to THIS style of implimentation. If they can make project #5 for 1/3rd the cost of this one, great, install them all over. From the descriptions though I don't see avenues for savings that great.
That's because Germany has long have had an anti-nuclear stance, while actively promoting solar energy. Even they are reconsidering on keeping nuclear plants open for a longer time, in the wake of economic realities.
I think that 'actively promoting it' is understating the issue.
Germany Slashes Solar Subsidies, Threatening Industry (Update2)
Homes and businesses earn a government-guaranteed price of as much as 47 euro cents ($0.74) for each kilowatt-hour of solar power they generate,
The country has trimmed subsidized prices by 5 percent a year from about 1 euro per kilowatt-hour nine years ago to spur the industry to control expenses and improve efficiency.
I think it was Italy that they found a 'solar' site running generators at night to earn more money...
The components that will benefit the most from mass production are the heliostats and parabolic trough assemblies. They are not currently mass produced. Each site requires thousands or more of identical units.
But their design is known, ergo it's simply an engineering problem to figure out approximately how much automation is possible, how much said automation would cost, and what production levels would be necessary to justify said automation. Take it backwards, when X is at 'Thousands' of production per year, Y automation is justified, resulting in Z cost. Increase X to 'Millions', 10Y automation is justified, resuling in z/5 cost. Or maybe it's z/2, I don't know, you end up with a lot of variables.
Solar thermal also faces some other problems - they have huge footprints for the power, need to be placed in the highest sun areas, making putting them away from people best, but you still need to run powerlines to them, which can add millions.
Given the level of subsidization green energy gets, including solar, I'd be working hard to automate/build a collector factory because if I can undersell everyone else I stand to make boatloads of money.
Those german salt mines were supposed to be safe when then put the waste in there. Only a few dozen years later they were proven wrong. (Please check the facts on this one, not your believes)
Hmmm...
Sigmar Gabriel, Germany's environment minister, has called the mine "the most problematic nuclear facility in Europe."
"The standards that were set [in the early days of Asse II] would be completely unacceptable today,"
American salt storage facilities are generally in better shape. James Conca, a geophysicist at New Mexico State University,
Same problem happen in yucca: can you granantee it still is safe in 100 years? And what if the operator goes bankrupt in 50 years, what will the state of yucca be 100 years later? That is a long period!
I can guarantee nothing, but I'd be perfectly willing to take a bet with long odds of a leak. The odds, even now, of Yucca leaking was in the eons, not centuries. As for the operator; that was the Federal government, and as long as our 'no reprocessing' requirement was in place I want the waste stored in a way we can get to it. After all, it's still got valuable fissile material in there!
And because you are talking about glassified waste it is high energy waste, but don' forget there also is a multiple of low radiation waste (gloves, pipes of the centra) that needs to be taken out of the biosfere for a long period.
I wasn't talking about glassification, that was Chibi. Still, as long as we're on the topic; part of the beauty of glassification is that you can even do it with the gloves and the pipes and such.
Honestly enough, it doesn't even 'need' to be taken out of the biosphere for that long. There are a lot of chemicals that are released that is deadlier by the pound or gallon than low level nuclear waste.
You are forgetting that every part of a solar thermal plant can be mass produced from relatively inexpensive basic materials.
No, I'm not. Matter of fact, my assessment DEPENDS on them using 'relatively inexpensive basic materials'. IE the reason I don't think costs will drop enough to make it economic is that you're not looking at insanely expensive special components becoming far cheaper. You're already looking at developed components that are almost as economic as they can get.
Which specific components do you propose becoming an order of magnitude cheaper?
Off the top of my head:
Mirrors, motors, supports.
Salt, Solar concentrator, piping, pumps, and turbine. Steam system. Salt reservoir.
Fairly standard industrial computer control system, customized for solar application.
Areas for good drop in price - the control system, possibly the concentrator. The steam system/turbine might be optimizable, but I don't see it dropping an order of magnitude. The Salt might get a bit cheaper if we start installing enough solar for a dedicated supply industry to form and specialize/automate.
Once mass production parts become available, it is pretty much reduced to contractors leveling the site and placement of equipment.
There's engineering costs to 'leveling' a site, and I'm not sure we want to 'level' sites the size of solar farms all over the place. There's drainage, erosion, and other issues invovled when you do stuff like that.
Not having one-off solar plants will help a LOT with engineering costs, but they're only one leg of three.
Call me a pessimist, but mirrors and motors are already 'fully developed' in non-solar applications. It's like electric cars. Hardly anything in an EV is unique to EVs, so we are able to come up with good cost estimates. Sure, the prototypes and initial runs will be more expensive, but that's true of any vehicle.
Automation would be good, it's just the question becomes one of 'can it be 3X-5X as good?'.
mainly transporting the existing spent fuel - Is that really a problem?(potentially NSFW due to language)
We pretty much have the 'transportation' issue cracked. When you're producing like 1 traincar a year worth of waste, you can get rather silly with containment.
Newsflash - we don't need 30 years to solve the transport issue, we've already HAD the 30 years.
demolishing a decommissioned nuclear reactor has not successfully been performed safely on a large scale yet. Nuclear industry proponents tout the amount of energy that can be extracted from a gram of Uranium but rarely factor the *Net Energy Return* of the Nuclear fuel cycle, associated infrastructure and the long term storage of toxic waste.
What about Yankee Rowe, Trojan*, Rancho Seco, and Maine Yankee*?
Except for the first, these seems to be the lemons of nuclear power plants. Thing is, plants that weren't lemons aren't the ones being shut down.
For example Diablo Canyon helped replace Rancho Seco, and has busted capacity factor/reliability standards.
It's also a newer plant. Basically, that's the problem with saying there's all sorts of trouble with nuclear reacters - sure, they have to be done right, but it's certainly possible and we have 30 years of experience telling us what to look out for. New reactor designs are safer AND less complicated - complication adds expense and cuts into reliability.
Look at cars, realize that you're practically looking at Model-Ts for safety/reliability statistics when we're looking to build a Civic.
What's up with that picture? I mean, they just piled the drums up that haphazardly? The plans I saw for the USA would have had the drums at least stacked nicely. Still, it's a storage site for low to medium waste - I'm sure some of those barrels contain some neat(if mildly radioactive) stuff...
Concerns about the area filling with water and contaminating the water supply? I wonder how realistic they are. Germans are reportably fairly nuclear-phobic.
Personally, the last statement makes me lose a lot of my respect for them: "Having dropped below nuclear power, solar power is now one of the least expensive energy sources in America." I also question their data points - seeing as how they go out into the 2020s
Wind has reportably been cheaper than solar for quite some time.
Insurance also is such a factor. the first 10 Billion (US situation) is insured by the plants, anything over that would be paid by taxes. Compare that to the cost of Chernobyl ( ~ 235 Billion) or 3 mile island (close to a billion).
First question: What sources are you using for Chernobyl? Second: What year dollars are you using?
TMI isn't as big of a deal - $1B is 'only' around double to triple the cost of decommisioning a reactor that hasn't melted down.
On Price-Anderson: It's acctually around $8.9B for an accident; because of the way Price-Anderson is structured, increasing the number of plants will increase the cap.
Currently Lloyd's charges around $400k/year for $300M of coverage.
Consider the gulf spill, Bhopal, etc... Is there any disaster in the billions where the government doesn't get involved?
I mean, TMI was comfortably contained within the cap, and the Chernobyl plant would have never been allowed to operate in the USA.
BP hasn't managed to bust the cap yet for the gulf oil spill yet, $4B thus far, so they might still manage to.
Still, we're talking about a major, major oil spill here. Increasing Price-Anderson levels might be good, but as you mention, hydro power can carry similar risks - imagine a New Orleans with tens of thousands potentially dead.
The question becomes one of how much risk is there, really? I mean, Chernobyl wasn't even encased in a containment dome, all US reactors have them. TMI DID have a dome - look at the cost difference. $1B vs $200B. TMI happened earlier than Chernobyl and has influenced design decisions since then. We've run simulations involving ramming the domes with a plane - it's a lot like what happens if you run an airliner into the hoover dam - there's a big difference between a concrete pressure vessel and a building.
In the end, I don't want 100% nuclear, but I do want it to be part of the solution. My theoretical mix is something like 40% nuclear(1), 15% hydro(2), 15% wind, 15% solar, 15% 'other'. You use the hydro to help balance out the wind/solar.
1: double that of today
2: Because our hydro power is already around maxed
Sure, the price may drop, but will it drop enough?
I tend to divide this stuff into three categories: Engineering/design, materials, and labor.
I don't see molten salt tech gaining major cuts in materials and labor. You still have to put down the mirrors, make the motors, run control/power lines, build the turbine, aquire all the salt, etc...
Engineering cost should go down, but will it go down an order of magnitude? Likely not.
You'd have to get the plant down in cost to the point it produces power for more like 6 cents a kwh, not 16.
In the case of a small business, this would mean finding a workable solution, that could be a ramp or could be a small staircase elevator, or could be having a call button that calls a couple of employees to lift the wheelchair user into the store.
'Small staircase elevator'? That's cheaper than a ramp?
I think what you're not understanding is that when you have a small company that might net $30k/year or less in profits, enough to support a family but not much else, it doesn't take much litigation to bankrupt them. You also don't necessarily get the best legal representation to be able to win those hardship waivers.
Who knows, maybe they could of won an exemption with the town for being in a 'historical building', maybe they could have made a deal with the guy in the wheelchair, maybe the guy in the wheelchair was just looking for money(it happens).
If he was looking for money paid to him to go away, well, he picked a poor target, but he doesn't care, and he's the least likely to work with them on a 'we'll work on a creative solution for whenever you come by'. He's going to want the 100% ADA solution, and money for him pointing it out.
Heh, your mentioning a button to call somebody out to assist him up the steps reminded me of when I proposed 'NRA Airlines', where you get a discount for open carry. Can't use the terminal, so no security checks other than a quick check for bombs, which would be done by retired(but still with good noses) military bomb dogs. Handicapped passengers would be assisted onto the plane by men with such names as 'Hans' and 'Franz'.
There are many different solutions that are possible, and as we know, there are still many businesses that don't have staircases.
True, but the ADA depends on lawsuits for enforcement, for the most part, thus they're just one lawsuit that's not even necessarily from a handicapped person away from major expenses.
Frankly, if adding a little staircase elevator or having a ramp or finding another solution was so expensive that it put the store out of business, I think maybe this guy's business problems were a little bigger than he described them.
Certainly running a bit close to the wire, but then, most small town small businesses ARE.
If the store had been in operation for two generations, then the ADA rules did not exist when they "built the place."
Indeed, and the business may have been in there long before.
Personally, I'd lean on the 'reasonable' clause a lot in these cases. A simple study that shows implausibility should work - in this case a business that profits $50k/year and quote from 3 contractors saying '$250k to make it compliant because this is considered 'work' and therefore we have to also bring A, B, and C up to 'code'.
Another funny thing - I remember reading that ADA rules increase the costs on apartments in NYC so much that it'd be cheaper to give them ALL free compliant apartments. Housing is already at a premium, and making something wheelchair compliant adds on something like 30% to the minimum space, plus makes the resulting kitchen(ette) LESS useful to non-handicapped.
You still have the issue that the wood used in homes isn't intended to be burned and that they shouldn't catch fire, especially if they're properly built to fire code standards.
As for metal roofs - they're gaining in popularity.
There are good reasons for Microsoft to call it a contract. It doesn't make it so, though. If you purchase a copy of Microsoft software from someone other than Microsoft, there is no privity of contract between you and Microsoft. Nor is there any consideration that passes between you and Microsoft.
This is why 'shrinkwrap EULAs' actually have a pretty bad enforcement record.
Judges tend not to look at it kindly when you're buying software that you can't return once opened* with a license hidden within that says 'return to the store for a refund if you don't agree with this'.
Especially when they say you're not buying a copy of the software, you're buying a license for it, with all these nasty one-sided terms, including such things as not offering replacement discs**, or making said discs more expensive than the software.
*Many stores in the USA won't take software returns, period, except for 'even exchange'. ;)
**After all, you're buying a license, not a physical copy.
And they don't even bother to orient them to the sun; being parallel to the street is considered to be more important. They're big piles of shit all around.
neighborhood design is a big issue and should be considered more carefully. Many homes are shitty all the way around, especially those 'McMansions' built during the boom. I think there needs to be a home grading system, a sort of house version of EPA gas mileage(though that metric has it's own problems).
As for the cooling towers and heat deflectors and all that, they DO add a substantial amount to the cost of a home and have limited ability to decrease the temperature. It'd work fine at moderate latitudes, for example I don't even have AC, do my 'cooling' via opening/closing windows and drawing air through my basement. But I'm pretty far north.
Basically, I think homes can be made a LOT more efficient economically, but a lot of greens are pushing uneconomical solutions.
For example, I wish that solar thermal heating via absorption chillers was around a third of it's price; but even now there are areas where one would pay itself off in 5-10 years.