When I say 'lessons learned', I'm thinking more about the technical details of working with a liquid sodium design. With liquid sodium, you can increase the reactor's temperature quite a bit to produce things such as hydrogen, increase efficiency so you're dumping less heat for more electricity, etc...
You're thinking I want to see the reactor design itself resurrected - I don't. I don't want breeder reactors for plutonium, I want them for their far greater ability to completely consume fuel and dispose of waste.
By the way, the bomb that manipulative people blame for the closure of the superphoenix went off on January 18, 1982.
That was the RPG attack, while explosives were involved I wouldn't call them 'bombs', the damage profile is quite different.
'63 months normal operations(but low power), 25 months outage due to technical problems, 66 months spent on hault due to political and administrative issues'.
In 1996 it finally reached 90% power, after they fixed the sodium system's corrosion and leakage problems.
Otherwise we wait for China, India or maybe even France and buy it from them.
Using coke to reduce it generates a lot of heat, but the heat is not the point, the reduction is the point - hence my nitpick that started the entire thread.
Ah, now I get you.
Pebble bed dates back to the 1950s. The South Africans and Germans have had decades to solve the hassles that Oak Ridge gave up on in the 1970s. Now the Chinese have some full scale prototypes thanks to help from German and South African research.
And we have information from the super-phoenix reactor.
You can melt stuff that is already steel with arc or induction furnaces with electricity from anywhere later - but to make it the chemistry is the thing and the heat is a useful byproduct.
Yeah, makes it even more important to save our coal for things like making steel. There's other methods, some that may use electricity, but coke is the cheap, efficient method.
You should be able to see my point right now that it's not about limitless electricity - you need something else - chemistry asserts reality over the dreams of vastly simplified economics.
I also, way back at the beginning of this, did mention that it's rather impractical to try to use nuclear power to smelt stuff, didn't I? Didn't I mention saving our natural gas for chemical feedstock and refining stuff, while using nuclear for electricity? I didn't mention saving coal for feedstock, but I have mentioned numerous times stopping using it for electricity generation, and usage for feedstock is orders of magnitude less than using it for electricity generation.
Basically, you got my nitpicking side up by saying you can't make steel using electricity - which is, technically speaking, incorrect. You can make steel using electricity to provide the heat, you can add a relatively minimal amount of other feedstock to provide the necessary chemistry. It's just currently an ass-backwards way to do it.
hence completely different sorts of breeder reactors without such flaws.
How completely different are they? None have been built yet to my knowledge. We learned a LOT about molten salt operation during that time. Sometimes the only way you can learn things are by doing them.
Think of an attempt at a 'revolutionary' new car. All new parts, etc... The car turns out to be a failure, but in designing the NEXT new car, you can still go back to the first for things like 'Fuel pump v1 didn't work right, but fuel pump v2 did'. 'Corrosion was a problem in these spots, with these characteristics, make sure we don't have these sorts of bends or use this alloy'. That sort of thing.
Pebble bed reactors are of course in trouble because the first full scale prototypes were only just commissioned this year. It takes a very long time to get a nuclear plant up and running, it's an experiment every time because nobody wants the 1970s crap that barely works at all. Actually it takes quite a while to iron out the bugs in new coal fired plants from existing designs as well.
Pebble beds date back to the '70s as well; the original prototype back then turned out to have a problem with the pebbles cracking. The waste produced is also harder to reprocess, so I'm iffy on them.
Why imitate the French, why not buy something from them and take advantage of decades of continuous R&D instead?
Good point. I figured we can go with even NEWER designs though, like you've proposed several times. Looking it up, France last stood up a reactor in 2000, and a big one at that. They have load-following compatible designs.
I'd certainly consider the economics of licensing. I'd have to double check, but I think a couple of the approved reactor designs are cross-licensed french plants.
Anyway, my major point is it is extremely unwise to suddenly build one hundred reactors when you are not sure you have a good enough design yet. It's better to take a few years, build a few prototypes scaling up the full size, and only then you'll know what power output you get from your hundred reactors and what capital cost you'll need to build them.
1,000,000 1 Million 1,000,000,000 1 Billion 1,000,000,000,000 1 Trillion.
How's it work in English? I seem to remember billion being a million millions, but I'm not sure.
Though just dealing with sets of numbers with lots of zeros, working with kilowatts, megawatts, thousands of millions of cubic feet, millions of thousands of cubic feet, made me triple check my conversions. No where else can you make a mistake of 3 orders of magnitude and get an answer that looks right.
Not really, I'd be more like 'Hello, I was having network issues, and as part of that I ran a network discovery scan and found that you were running your network on channel 6. As the neighbor on the other side uses 11 the guy behind me uses 1, I'm wondering if, since you're at the corner, you could use 11 too?'
You don't need to tap into a network in order to be able to see the network.
I did pretty much this in a dormitory setting for a friend - 20 networks visible, pretty much evenly between 1, 7, and 11.
His router was on 1, which had the most(if barely), but also had the strongest of the other networks. I ended up sticking him on 9. Problems went away.
And you can do quite silly things with simple chemistry if you have virtually unlimited electricity. If nothing else you can go back all the way to [i]blister steel[/i].
For example, would your processes have changed if electricity was free? Completely, utterly free?
Hmm... How about rather than using carbon monoxide as a reducing agent, how about powdered aluminum and/or hydrogen. Heck, as I said, introduce powdered graphite or charcoal in a limited oxygen environment. You'll get monoxide.
I'll ask you: In all the wide world of chemisty, if you're NOT ALLOWED TO USE COAL, but are given 'free' electricity, would you still be able to make steel? My thought is: Total market distortion, but yes, you'd be able to. You're tossing centuries of experience, so it's not going to be as good at first, but it can be done.
Also don't make the mistake of thinking the superphoenix reactor was shut down because some idiot set off a bomb near it a few years before the project was scrapped. It was unfortunately an expensive dead end because it is very difficult to physically handle very large volumes of highly radioactive material and that approach required both a lot of handling and more active fuel than most reactors.
There were numerous attacks on it, including at least one RPG attack. I agree though, they DID have some difficulties; as an entirely new class of reactor, I'd call it a prototype that turned out to have difficulties in development, examine it for 'lessons learned' and build a better one. From my readings they had most of the problems solved by the time it was shut down due to political pressure.
but notably almost none of the research was done in the USA due to being stuck in the 1970s and begging for handouts.
So, rather then build reactors to make money they kept asking for handouts they weren't getting? They're trying to export their designs, and last I heard pebble beds were in trouble.
but unfortunately even I know a vast amount more than the "nuclear now at any cost" idiots that are influencing people here with mostly emotive arguments and outright lies.
I'd like to most, if not all, of our coal plants replaced by nuclear ones. Just for the non-CO2 pollution reductions.
As such I'd like to see: 1. Imitate the French - standardize on a few reactor types; if you have a couple dozen plants of the same type, engineering expenses are substantially reduced. 2. As long as we're building around a hundred plants, I'd want to try out the half a dozen or so new reactor designs - I'd let the engineers make the call on which ones are the most likely, and which the least. Build a test plant of each, then a second using lessons learned, after that standardize on the best, maybe a second if it's optimal in different ways. 3. Reprocess our waste. It's still mostly fuel. This may involve having a number of smaller phoenix style breeders to help feed the more traditional plants and get rid of waste.
Come off it - you can't just throw graphite and iron ore into an electric arc furnace and hope or we would have been doing that for a century.
No, we can't. Well, we can, but it's totally uneconomic to do so, like I've said every post. There's all sorts of stuff we CAN do, that we don't because it's utterly impractical other than in the 'oh neat' sense.
I've read about blast furnaces and such. I've read about the Bessemer process. There's lots of ways to get carbon into iron to make steel. Blast furnaces are just the most economic we have at this time(for bulk steel).
Heck, looking at the blast furnace process, in our theoretical electric version we'd simply need to flow CO to replace the coke.
I still maintain that it's entirely possible to make an electric furnace do the same, it's just, you know, not cost effective. Maybe not an electric arc one, but there's many options.
We already know the old stuff doesn't work very well but all we've done is make sure that it can't break as easily. The Westinghouse stuff really is just polishing a turd.
What designs do you suggest? The westinghouse stuff is only ONE of the reactor designs on the list. I'd like to see a molten salt reactor, but the French even had trouble with that(even if a lot of it was protester sparked).
Renewables need subsidies because current fuels, coal/gas/nuclear, don't include the full costs of their use in the prices.
Are you arguing that the renewable fuels, which generally enjoy subsidies orders of magnitude higher than coal, gas, or nuclear, aren't subsidized enough?
Heck, for that matter, how does nuclear not cover it's full costs? I could see arguing about the waste - but France, Japan, and other countries manage to dispose of it(normally they reprocess it). Yucca Mountain is a boondoggle caused by the government... The deal, passed more or less unilaterally by the government, was 'pay us $X per Mwh produced, and we'll dispose of the waste'. It's gotten so bad the nuclear companies are suing the government for failure to perform the contract.
The only thing they've done in all that time is to being in some old Japanese R&D via company mergers. If they don't start doing R&D the answer is to wait ten years until the Chinese perfect pebble bed or fifteen for the Indians to perfect accelerated thorium. The local alternative is three mile island with the safety features it should have had in the 1970s painted green.
We have quite a few 'updated' reactor designs that are sitting approved. The problem is that federal subsidies don't yet even equal the anticipated regulatory burden expected to get a plant approved and built. Much less the protests by people. Not even necessarily NIMBY types, there are spots without significant NIMBY, but you have the BANANA people who will bus in to protest nuclear anywhere.
The local alternative is three mile island with the safety features it should have had in the 1970s painted green.
3rd/4th generation reactors tend to have things like 50% to 80% less wiring, valves, pumps, and such while actually increasing redundency in cooling. They are designed with 'fail safe' measures like control rods that will insert if the reactor gets too hot.
Also you can't make steel using nuclear generated energy since you need to put carbon in there (from coking coal) and various other reactions - all you can do with electricity alone is melt existing steel or heat it up to forge.
That's only ONE method of making steel. Like I said, you'd have to be rather round-about to do it, because you'd need to use electric heat as the nuclear boilers don't get hot enough. Adding carbon isn't difficult, coking coal is cheap, easy, and developed, but you could also use things like graphite or even charcoal if you had to. At that point you're not using the coal/coke as the principal source of heat, but as a feedstock to make the particular alloy you want. You need an order of magnitude less that way.
Anyways, I know it's not economic - which is why I mentioned keeping natural gas/coal around FOR doing things like smelting operations for steel. You can use just enough coke to make the alloy, provide the rest of the heat via natural gas.
Back to basic economics (should have been in original post) - assuming that the operators of the plants are rational, the only justification for NOT operating a power plant is if the production would be too expensive. If they have it on standby, that makes it a 'peaking plant'.
With a pre-built natural gas plant that's not defective, that would indicate expensive natural gas compared to the coal the coal plant is burning. Cut the cost of the NG in half or double the cost of the coal, and I'm willing to bet they'd shut the coal plant down.
The grandparent seemed to imply that natural gas was too cheap to operate the plant. The situation would have to be the complete opposite.
Thanks for identifying it - that's what I was searching for - 'combustion turbine'.
Wasn't aware they can be multifuel that way. Thought they had to be basically hardware setup for a given fuel. How big of a hit does it give you on efficiency?
And I'm aware of the combined cycle, that's how you get up in the range of 60%.
This depends on where you live. In Western Australia (and Australia in general) it's cheaper to fill you car with LPG (Liquefied Petroleum Gas, made from Natural Gas) then it is with Petrol. Nearly half the price for LPG then for unleaded. Also for power generation, a bit cheaper then coal as we just pipe it down from the north west shelf.
Ever consider that this might be due to various levels of taxes? The USA is commonly said to have the lowest taxes - but 70 cents out of every gallon is taxes.
Anyways, yes, it's regional. As I noted in my original post.
Some areas have lots of cheap natural gas. Some don't, yet produce their power via it anyways.
Annual usage is ~20 TRILLION cubic feet. - 22,834,120 Million cubic feet is 22.8 Trillion.
Our proven reserves are only about 8 years worth, extended to ~50 years if you assume level use and that the unproven reserves(IE guesses) are accurate.
Even in the '70s you'd be looking at more than $200k.
Personally I think that risk assessment NEEDS to be done - You get the same deal with retrofitting airplane control lines to eliminate spark risk. The risk is of controls sparking when the fuel level in the wings is EXTREMELY low. The math is actually worse than the Pinto.
The risk is so remote and retrofit so expensive, it's not financially responsible to do it. It makes sense for NEW aircraft, but not used.
Generally this is the way I advocate doing things, actually. Doesn't mean that we can't discuss the various possibilities though, seeing as how we are the market, in the end.
I'd be somewhere in between. Yes, I think the stuff is neat, and I don't care as much about random strangers in a foreign country than I do people I know.
On the other hand, I'm a patriot and believe that while my country isn't perfect, the stuff I do/build will, on average, be used to advance my country's goals and the overall good.
Superior guided missiles leads to lower collateral damage, fewer missiles needed, faster resolution of a conflict. It's when the conflict is drawn out that it turns into a real meat-grinder.
CO2 is not a pollutant. It is in fact essential for the Earth's life cycle. Plants would not survive without it.
Water is not a pollutant, it is also essential in the earth's life cycle. We wouldn't survive without it. It still kills tens of thousands a year from overabundance.
I'll note that my reasoning behind getting rid of coal plants has always been more due to the pollution they produce than the CO2 they release.
No, the reason people are going for natural gas is the typical myopic management of today. Building a natural gas power plant is very cheap, even if the fuel isn't. Since people plan everything on the short term today, what matters is the low initial capital costs, even if you have to screw your customers in the long term.
It's also easy. Nuclear everyone's afraid of even though it has fewer deaths involved with it than pretty much any other industry, and coal is dirty. So getting approval for a natural gas plant is relatively quick and easy.
We're never going to 'run out' of oil in the traditional sense, but just like with oil, additional sources tend to come from more difficult to extract deposits leading to increased costs.
As such, I hope to retain NG for stuff that natural gas is better at, such as feedstock for chemical production and heating stuff that it's impractical to use nuclear electricity to do so(smelting, for example).
I think you have it backwards - the price of NG has to drop below a certain level for them to use it, or the price of electricity has to rise above a certain level.
This is part of why electricity can be expensive in some areas - due to fears about nuclear, and (justified) concern about the pollution of coal, they're pretty much stuck with natural gas. Unfortunately, NG tends to be the cheapest to build a plant for, but the most expensive on fuel - and Natural Gas is one of the more volatile markets.
It would be possible to build a power plant which was multi fuel or even convert an existing one to a different fuel. Steam turbines don't care what the source of heat to produce the steam is.
That's true for conventional steam turbines, but the really efficient natural gas plants are single fuel - they're built for NG. They use turbines that are a touch more like jet engines to help increase their thermal efficiency to over 50%.
You can convert a coal plant almost directly, but then you're stuck with the plant's existing ~30% efficiency.
what is the moral framework which has enabled you to justify the ends? And what was the argument leading to your conclusion?
A multitude of thoughts here.
On death: Car designers also have to deal with the statistical fact that somebody is going to die in the vehicle they design. Likely multitudes.
So, Come from it from a different angle. Whether car or weapon design, come at it from the idea that the person is either a sociopath on some level, or that he's a patriot. In designing a new weapon, sure, I'm going to be aware that it WILL be misused. But, on some level, I'm convinced that it will be misused less than it will be used properly; to advance effective and therefore shorter and less bloody warfare, to prevent conflict(like the pain ray), etc...
Kalashnikov, by reports, isn't happy that his rifle is the most common in the hands of the terrorists. But for every one in the hands of the terrorists, there are dozens in the hands of security people and regular military.
He designed a rifle for the USSR government as a patriot. As a former infantryman, he designed the best infantryman rifle he could.
Slashdot Mirror
"The" standard? Some manufacturers have mandated all the way up to cat6 for gig over copper, on some equipment.
That's because it was a standard
1000BASE-TX - 'uses a simpler protocol than the official 1000BASE-T standard so the electronics can be cheaper, but requires Category 6 cabling'.
Certain other, more specialized standards, might require it for non-ethernet uses.
When I say 'lessons learned', I'm thinking more about the technical details of working with a liquid sodium design. With liquid sodium, you can increase the reactor's temperature quite a bit to produce things such as hydrogen, increase efficiency so you're dumping less heat for more electricity, etc...
You're thinking I want to see the reactor design itself resurrected - I don't. I don't want breeder reactors for plutonium, I want them for their far greater ability to completely consume fuel and dispose of waste.
By the way, the bomb that manipulative people blame for the closure of the superphoenix went off on January 18, 1982.
That was the RPG attack, while explosives were involved I wouldn't call them 'bombs', the damage profile is quite different.
'63 months normal operations(but low power), 25 months outage due to technical problems, 66 months spent on hault due to political and administrative issues'.
In 1996 it finally reached 90% power, after they fixed the sodium system's corrosion and leakage problems.
Otherwise we wait for China, India or maybe even France and buy it from them.
Something of this scale should be joint, I think.
Using coke to reduce it generates a lot of heat, but the heat is not the point, the reduction is the point - hence my nitpick that started the entire thread.
Ah, now I get you.
Pebble bed dates back to the 1950s. The South Africans and Germans have had decades to solve the hassles that Oak Ridge gave up on in the 1970s. Now the Chinese have some full scale prototypes thanks to help from German and South African research.
And we have information from the super-phoenix reactor.
You can melt stuff that is already steel with arc or induction furnaces with electricity from anywhere later - but to make it the chemistry is the thing and the heat is a useful byproduct.
Yeah, makes it even more important to save our coal for things like making steel. There's other methods, some that may use electricity, but coke is the cheap, efficient method.
You should be able to see my point right now that it's not about limitless electricity - you need something else - chemistry asserts reality over the dreams of vastly simplified economics.
I also, way back at the beginning of this, did mention that it's rather impractical to try to use nuclear power to smelt stuff, didn't I? Didn't I mention saving our natural gas for chemical feedstock and refining stuff, while using nuclear for electricity? I didn't mention saving coal for feedstock, but I have mentioned numerous times stopping using it for electricity generation, and usage for feedstock is orders of magnitude less than using it for electricity generation.
Basically, you got my nitpicking side up by saying you can't make steel using electricity - which is, technically speaking, incorrect. You can make steel using electricity to provide the heat, you can add a relatively minimal amount of other feedstock to provide the necessary chemistry. It's just currently an ass-backwards way to do it.
hence completely different sorts of breeder reactors without such flaws.
How completely different are they? None have been built yet to my knowledge. We learned a LOT about molten salt operation during that time. Sometimes the only way you can learn things are by doing them.
Think of an attempt at a 'revolutionary' new car. All new parts, etc... The car turns out to be a failure, but in designing the NEXT new car, you can still go back to the first for things like 'Fuel pump v1 didn't work right, but fuel pump v2 did'. 'Corrosion was a problem in these spots, with these characteristics, make sure we don't have these sorts of bends or use this alloy'. That sort of thing.
Pebble bed reactors are of course in trouble because the first full scale prototypes were only just commissioned this year. It takes a very long time to get a nuclear plant up and running, it's an experiment every time because nobody wants the 1970s crap that barely works at all. Actually it takes quite a while to iron out the bugs in new coal fired plants from existing designs as well.
Pebble beds date back to the '70s as well; the original prototype back then turned out to have a problem with the pebbles cracking. The waste produced is also harder to reprocess, so I'm iffy on them.
Why imitate the French, why not buy something from them and take advantage of decades of continuous R&D instead?
Good point. I figured we can go with even NEWER designs though, like you've proposed several times. Looking it up, France last stood up a reactor in 2000, and a big one at that. They have load-following compatible designs.
I'd certainly consider the economics of licensing. I'd have to double check, but I think a couple of the approved reactor designs are cross-licensed french plants.
Anyway, my major point is it is extremely unwise to suddenly build one hundred reactors when you are not sure you have a good enough design yet. It's better to take a few years, build a few prototypes scaling up the full size, and only then you'll know what power output you get from your hundred reactors and what capital cost you'll need to build them.
I did mention building prototypes, didn't I?
USanian:
1,000,000 1 Million
1,000,000,000 1 Billion
1,000,000,000,000 1 Trillion.
How's it work in English? I seem to remember billion being a million millions, but I'm not sure.
Though just dealing with sets of numbers with lots of zeros, working with kilowatts, megawatts, thousands of millions of cubic feet, millions of thousands of cubic feet, made me triple check my conversions. No where else can you make a mistake of 3 orders of magnitude and get an answer that looks right.
Placing your friend on channel 9 may have helped mostly because it stayed away from channel 1
Maybe, but it's not like 6 and 11 were that far behind. Putting him on 6 or 11 would have gained me maybe a DB of SNR.
I figure that by putting him on 9, at least the interference would be different between the high and low. It seems to have worked.
My personal choice would have been to get him into the 5 GHz band, but his router wasn't capable of that.
Not really, I'd be more like 'Hello, I was having network issues, and as part of that I ran a network discovery scan and found that you were running your network on channel 6. As the neighbor on the other side uses 11 the guy behind me uses 1, I'm wondering if, since you're at the corner, you could use 11 too?'
You don't need to tap into a network in order to be able to see the network.
I did pretty much this in a dormitory setting for a friend - 20 networks visible, pretty much evenly between 1, 7, and 11.
His router was on 1, which had the most(if barely), but also had the strongest of the other networks. I ended up sticking him on 9. Problems went away.
It's not economics - it's simple chemistry!
And you can do quite silly things with simple chemistry if you have virtually unlimited electricity. If nothing else you can go back all the way to [i]blister steel[/i].
For example, would your processes have changed if electricity was free? Completely, utterly free?
Hmm... How about rather than using carbon monoxide as a reducing agent, how about powdered aluminum and/or hydrogen. Heck, as I said, introduce powdered graphite or charcoal in a limited oxygen environment. You'll get monoxide.
I'll ask you: In all the wide world of chemisty, if you're NOT ALLOWED TO USE COAL, but are given 'free' electricity, would you still be able to make steel?
My thought is: Total market distortion, but yes, you'd be able to. You're tossing centuries of experience, so it's not going to be as good at first, but it can be done.
Also don't make the mistake of thinking the superphoenix reactor was shut down because some idiot set off a bomb near it a few years before the project was scrapped. It was unfortunately an expensive dead end because it is very difficult to physically handle very large volumes of highly radioactive material and that approach required both a lot of handling and more active fuel than most reactors.
There were numerous attacks on it, including at least one RPG attack. I agree though, they DID have some difficulties; as an entirely new class of reactor, I'd call it a prototype that turned out to have difficulties in development, examine it for 'lessons learned' and build a better one. From my readings they had most of the problems solved by the time it was shut down due to political pressure.
but notably almost none of the research was done in the USA due to being stuck in the 1970s and begging for handouts.
So, rather then build reactors to make money they kept asking for handouts they weren't getting? They're trying to export their designs, and last I heard pebble beds were in trouble.
but unfortunately even I know a vast amount more than the "nuclear now at any cost" idiots that are influencing people here with mostly emotive arguments and outright lies.
I'd like to most, if not all, of our coal plants replaced by nuclear ones. Just for the non-CO2 pollution reductions.
As such I'd like to see:
1. Imitate the French - standardize on a few reactor types; if you have a couple dozen plants of the same type, engineering expenses are substantially reduced.
2. As long as we're building around a hundred plants, I'd want to try out the half a dozen or so new reactor designs - I'd let the engineers make the call on which ones are the most likely, and which the least. Build a test plant of each, then a second using lessons learned, after that standardize on the best, maybe a second if it's optimal in different ways.
3. Reprocess our waste. It's still mostly fuel. This may involve having a number of smaller phoenix style breeders to help feed the more traditional plants and get rid of waste.
Come off it - you can't just throw graphite and iron ore into an electric arc furnace and hope or we would have been doing that for a century.
No, we can't. Well, we can, but it's totally uneconomic to do so, like I've said every post. There's all sorts of stuff we CAN do, that we don't because it's utterly impractical other than in the 'oh neat' sense.
I've read about blast furnaces and such. I've read about the Bessemer process. There's lots of ways to get carbon into iron to make steel. Blast furnaces are just the most economic we have at this time(for bulk steel).
Heck, looking at the blast furnace process, in our theoretical electric version we'd simply need to flow CO to replace the coke.
I still maintain that it's entirely possible to make an electric furnace do the same, it's just, you know, not cost effective. Maybe not an electric arc one, but there's many options.
We already know the old stuff doesn't work very well but all we've done is make sure that it can't break as easily. The Westinghouse stuff really is just polishing a turd.
What designs do you suggest? The westinghouse stuff is only ONE of the reactor designs on the list. I'd like to see a molten salt reactor, but the French even had trouble with that(even if a lot of it was protester sparked).
Renewables need subsidies because current fuels, coal/gas/nuclear, don't include the full costs of their use in the prices.
Are you arguing that the renewable fuels, which generally enjoy subsidies orders of magnitude higher than coal, gas, or nuclear, aren't subsidized enough?
Heck, for that matter, how does nuclear not cover it's full costs? I could see arguing about the waste - but France, Japan, and other countries manage to dispose of it(normally they reprocess it). Yucca Mountain is a boondoggle caused by the government... The deal, passed more or less unilaterally by the government, was 'pay us $X per Mwh produced, and we'll dispose of the waste'. It's gotten so bad the nuclear companies are suing the government for failure to perform the contract.
A source
$666 Million for 27.7 Billion kwh of electricity. Around 2.4 cents per kwh. Nuclear got 1.267B, but produced 794B kwh. .16 cents per kwh.
Heck, just use the chart:
Nuclear: $1.59 per Mwh .25 .44
Wind: $23.37
Solar: $24.34
Refined coal: $29.81 (wtf? aren't we trying to reduce coal use?)
Natural Gas:
Coal:
The only thing they've done in all that time is to being in some old Japanese R&D via company mergers. If they don't start doing R&D the answer is to wait ten years until the Chinese perfect pebble bed or fifteen for the Indians to perfect accelerated thorium. The local alternative is three mile island with the safety features it should have had in the 1970s painted green.
We have quite a few 'updated' reactor designs that are sitting approved. The problem is that federal subsidies don't yet even equal the anticipated regulatory burden expected to get a plant approved and built. Much less the protests by people. Not even necessarily NIMBY types, there are spots without significant NIMBY, but you have the BANANA people who will bus in to protest nuclear anywhere.
The local alternative is three mile island with the safety features it should have had in the 1970s painted green.
3rd/4th generation reactors tend to have things like 50% to 80% less wiring, valves, pumps, and such while actually increasing redundency in cooling. They are designed with 'fail safe' measures like control rods that will insert if the reactor gets too hot.
Also you can't make steel using nuclear generated energy since you need to put carbon in there (from coking coal) and various other reactions - all you can do with electricity alone is melt existing steel or heat it up to forge.
That's only ONE method of making steel. Like I said, you'd have to be rather round-about to do it, because you'd need to use electric heat as the nuclear boilers don't get hot enough. Adding carbon isn't difficult, coking coal is cheap, easy, and developed, but you could also use things like graphite or even charcoal if you had to. At that point you're not using the coal/coke as the principal source of heat, but as a feedstock to make the particular alloy you want. You need an order of magnitude less that way.
Anyways, I know it's not economic - which is why I mentioned keeping natural gas/coal around FOR doing things like smelting operations for steel. You can use just enough coke to make the alloy, provide the rest of the heat via natural gas.
Back to basic economics (should have been in original post) - assuming that the operators of the plants are rational, the only justification for NOT operating a power plant is if the production would be too expensive. If they have it on standby, that makes it a 'peaking plant'.
With a pre-built natural gas plant that's not defective, that would indicate expensive natural gas compared to the coal the coal plant is burning. Cut the cost of the NG in half or double the cost of the coal, and I'm willing to bet they'd shut the coal plant down.
The grandparent seemed to imply that natural gas was too cheap to operate the plant. The situation would have to be the complete opposite.
Thanks for identifying it - that's what I was searching for - 'combustion turbine'.
Wasn't aware they can be multifuel that way. Thought they had to be basically hardware setup for a given fuel. How big of a hit does it give you on efficiency?
And I'm aware of the combined cycle, that's how you get up in the range of 60%.
This depends on where you live. In Western Australia (and Australia in general) it's cheaper to fill you car with LPG (Liquefied Petroleum Gas, made from Natural Gas) then it is with Petrol. Nearly half the price for LPG then for unleaded. Also for power generation, a bit cheaper then coal as we just pipe it down from the north west shelf.
Ever consider that this might be due to various levels of taxes? The USA is commonly said to have the lowest taxes - but 70 cents out of every gallon is taxes.
Anyways, yes, it's regional. As I noted in my original post.
Some areas have lots of cheap natural gas. Some don't, yet produce their power via it anyways.
Re-read the DOE site.
Annual usage is ~20 TRILLION cubic feet. - 22,834,120 Million cubic feet is 22.8 Trillion.
Our proven reserves are only about 8 years worth, extended to ~50 years if you assume level use and that the unproven reserves(IE guesses) are accurate.
Even in the '70s you'd be looking at more than $200k.
Personally I think that risk assessment NEEDS to be done - You get the same deal with retrofitting airplane control lines to eliminate spark risk. The risk is of controls sparking when the fuel level in the wings is EXTREMELY low. The math is actually worse than the Pinto.
The risk is so remote and retrofit so expensive, it's not financially responsible to do it. It makes sense for NEW aircraft, but not used.
Trouble for ford was killing and maiming customers becomes a lot more expensive when its known you are aware of the problem.
That and, even for the time, I'd consider $200k for a life as undervaluing it.
I'm actually less upset about the math than figuring on people being that cheap.
Figure on $750k - $1M per life, and you'd be doing the recall.
Generally this is the way I advocate doing things, actually. Doesn't mean that we can't discuss the various possibilities though, seeing as how we are the market, in the end.
I'd be somewhere in between. Yes, I think the stuff is neat, and I don't care as much about random strangers in a foreign country than I do people I know.
On the other hand, I'm a patriot and believe that while my country isn't perfect, the stuff I do/build will, on average, be used to advance my country's goals and the overall good.
Superior guided missiles leads to lower collateral damage, fewer missiles needed, faster resolution of a conflict. It's when the conflict is drawn out that it turns into a real meat-grinder.
CO2 is not a pollutant. It is in fact essential for the Earth's life cycle. Plants would not survive without it.
Water is not a pollutant, it is also essential in the earth's life cycle. We wouldn't survive without it. It still kills tens of thousands a year from overabundance.
I'll note that my reasoning behind getting rid of coal plants has always been more due to the pollution they produce than the CO2 they release.
No, the reason people are going for natural gas is the typical myopic management of today. Building a natural gas power plant is very cheap, even if the fuel isn't. Since people plan everything on the short term today, what matters is the low initial capital costs, even if you have to screw your customers in the long term.
It's also easy. Nuclear everyone's afraid of even though it has fewer deaths involved with it than pretty much any other industry, and coal is dirty. So getting approval for a natural gas plant is relatively quick and easy.
We're never going to 'run out' of oil in the traditional sense, but just like with oil, additional sources tend to come from more difficult to extract deposits leading to increased costs.
As such, I hope to retain NG for stuff that natural gas is better at, such as feedstock for chemical production and heating stuff that it's impractical to use nuclear electricity to do so(smelting, for example).
I think you have it backwards - the price of NG has to drop below a certain level for them to use it, or the price of electricity has to rise above a certain level.
This is part of why electricity can be expensive in some areas - due to fears about nuclear, and (justified) concern about the pollution of coal, they're pretty much stuck with natural gas. Unfortunately, NG tends to be the cheapest to build a plant for, but the most expensive on fuel - and Natural Gas is one of the more volatile markets.
Better check your sources...
Natural gas: 53.6 MJ/kg
Anthracite Coal: 32.5 MJ/kg
Bituminous Coal: 24 MJ/Kg
Natural gas has around twice the energy per gram of coal, depending on whether you're looking at Anthracite or Bituminous.
Now, it's tilted way the other way if you look at volume - Coal is 72.4 or 20 MJ/Liter, vs .0364 MJ/L or 9 if you compress it.
As John pointed out, Coal is mainly carbon. 'Natural Gas' is mainly Methane, or CH4.
C+O2 -> Energy +CO2
CH4 + 2 O2 -> 2 Energy + 2 H2O + CO2.
Add in that NG plants can be more efficient than coal plants, 60+% vs ~30%, and you get a LOT less carbon dioxide from NG than coal.
It would be possible to build a power plant which was multi fuel or even convert an existing one to a different fuel. Steam turbines don't care what the source of heat to produce the steam is.
That's true for conventional steam turbines, but the really efficient natural gas plants are single fuel - they're built for NG. They use turbines that are a touch more like jet engines to help increase their thermal efficiency to over 50%.
You can convert a coal plant almost directly, but then you're stuck with the plant's existing ~30% efficiency.
what is the moral framework which has enabled you to justify the ends? And what was the argument leading to your conclusion?
A multitude of thoughts here.
On death: Car designers also have to deal with the statistical fact that somebody is going to die in the vehicle they design. Likely multitudes.
So, Come from it from a different angle. Whether car or weapon design, come at it from the idea that the person is either a sociopath on some level, or that he's a patriot. In designing a new weapon, sure, I'm going to be aware that it WILL be misused. But, on some level, I'm convinced that it will be misused less than it will be used properly; to advance effective and therefore shorter and less bloody warfare, to prevent conflict(like the pain ray), etc...
Kalashnikov, by reports, isn't happy that his rifle is the most common in the hands of the terrorists. But for every one in the hands of the terrorists, there are dozens in the hands of security people and regular military.
He designed a rifle for the USSR government as a patriot. As a former infantryman, he designed the best infantryman rifle he could.