I am talking about getting rid of at least 90% of coal usage and at least 50% of natural gas worldwide and 50% of oil too (to start with). So its not just the electrical grid, you also need the heating solution and transportation. We need that to fix climate change.
Ah, a change of topic. I was restricting myself to the electric grid, as I specified. As for the rest of it, I don't know what you think you're arguing with me about seeing as how I agree with it.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. Right now you can get a 250W panel for around $200. You should be able to generate around 438kWh from it a year(20% capacity factor). Or around $4.38 worth of electricity, which is a 46 year straight payoff(not worth it). If you pay 20 cents like some people, it's only a 23 year payoff(worth it).
A 22% increase in efficiency makes that 250W panel into a 305W one. 534kWh/year, $5.34 - 37 year payoff, which is barely not worth it, but you're looking at not needing to be paying on the highest end of the scale anymore for it to be worth it.
Who cares about efficiency? The only things that are relevant are: cost, space, amount of energy/power produced.
I'd say the guy performing the cost estimate, because efficiency at extraction is a key indicator to how much space you'll need to produce your target amount of power(or how much power your limited space can produce), which determines how much equipment you need to do it, which drives cost. That's without considering that if you need to purchase/lease/rent land or area rights there can be a cost there as well.
But as an executive deciding between different options, you're right.
Electricity is fungible - IE most people don't care where it comes from, so any one kWh is equivalent to any other.
Consider if Biodiesel is $3.50 and fossil diesel is $3. You're going to sell vastly more diesel than biodiesel. Make Biodiesel 22% cheaper and it's now $2.73. The situation will reverse practically overnight. More realistically what will happen is that investments in BD would languish until diesel hit $3.50, then plants would be built right and left, pushing down the price of both, but as process improvements decrease the cost of BD and capacity is increased even as fossil oil becomes harder to extract, that more and more BD would be sold even as FD sales decrease. Eventually FD would occupy more or less the same position as BD now.
To put it another way - alternative energy is very cliff-like - you don't notice much change until you actually fall of the cliff, then change happens very quickly. We're relatively close to the cliff right now. Hawaii is holding onto the old production model by it's fingernails. It's possible that very soon daytime electricity will be cheaper there than nighttime.
To avoid the chads problem I think we should stick with the 'fill in the bubble' or 'finish this line' type optical scanning ballots. Easier to write what counts and what doesn't, as well as easy for verification/counting by hand if necessary.
It's less about absolute accuracy than it is about being auditable.
Except you can't much go beyond 25% solar+wind with current tech.
Why not? Also, keep in mind that I'm talking about shutting down every single fossil fuel power plant, though some would be converted to biomatter plants. That's a massive game changer right there.
The idea is that at 20% solar covers the daytime increase in power usage. It should be installed such that, normally speaking, it only covers 50% of daytime usage. 20% wind is within reach without massive grid modification. My peaking/windless generators are the hydro and biomass plants. I would encourage the use of thermal storage systems though - bigger water heaters that operate only when electricity is at it's cheapest(most plentiful).
As for transmitting electricity for thousands of miles, at least in the USA you wouldn't have to. You would just 'trade off' production towards the area having a shortfall.
I think you are ignoring the fact that many countries have lots of hydro, like Brazil (70-80% of our electricity is hydro). Many other countries have over 50% hydro. The US alone about just as much hydro as nuclear (around 15%). Canada is close to 2/3 hydro.
Well, yes, I keep forgetting to put 'for the USA' into my statement. It also averages out to the world. Specific countries have different ideal setups. Brazil and Canada can keep using it's hydro and neglect solar in favor of wind. Hawaii and other equatorial islands can go nearly all solar. Alaska would probably end up being more nuclear(as I understand it our hydro prospects aren't that great).
Finally, I'll say there's a reason I said 'roughly'.
But then there is this other argument that somehow big reservoir hydro is bad. It takes too much land.
There's a lot more wrong with hydro than just 'takes too much land'. There's lots of ecological issues, which is why the USA is considered pretty much maxed out on hydro. It' also not zero CO2, it's really low, but making all that concrete does produce it. Plus you eventually have to dredge the lake to get rid of sediment build up.
It produces methane, the same stuff natural gas is made of.
For some reason this irks me. It's the same chemical as the majority of natural gas, IE CH4. NG tends to be a bit dirtier depending on how well they've filtered/cleaned it.
The big Germany solar push is a really stupid idea compared to a big solar push in South/Central America / Africa / Portugal / Spain / Middle East.
Southern half of the USA for that matter.
But much like big pharma isn't interested in cheap medicine, biomass doesn't have the billions in costs (hence doesn't have high profits). Its not a matter of national pride.
I think you're glossing over a number of issues. There are real-world concerns with the growth, harvest, processing(moisture removal), and delivery of biomass to the plants. There are also serious pollution concerns when you do a lot of it. Mostly fine particulates and NOx compounds. You have a very interesting outlook if you think that 'high costs' = 'high profits'. You get the highest net profits from high-gross profits combined with low costs - IE cheap to produced, sold high. Electricity is normally a standard in fungible goods - if you can produce it a cheaper way, that's the way to make a profit.
Huh, that made total sense when I wrote the post. What's captured? Costs. 'externalities' are costs that are not directly paid for by the company. Pollution is normally an externality because while it causes harm(which is a cost), it's imposed on others. Such as the population as a whole for air pollution, those downstream for water pollution, etc...
There's not a lot of external costs with nuclear power - the waste isn't going up the smokestack.
*sigh* --- I measure 'efficiency' by the amount of human effort it takes to run the machine. So, if the process can be automated and low maintenance....
What about the human effort required to make the machine? Or perhaps I'm expanding the scope of the machine you're looking at - beyond the storage system to also encompass the generation systems, because if you make the storage systems more efficient you need less generation, and on average that will indeed save you human effort if the extra efficiency isn't too expensive(in human labor and such).
Renewable biomass will expand (the largest portion of current non-Hydro renewables). Geothermal will expand. Wind will expand. Solar will expand.
Geothermal is smaller than wind.
Actually no. My plan isn't calling for 1/4 of what yours is. Mine is looking at roughly a 3-4-fold increase across the board. What you're looking at is closer to a 500-fold increase for solar and 100-fold increase for wind.
Your target: 25%. Subtract the 7% hydro, because we both agree it's maxed: 18% remaining. Per the EIA, in 2013 wind actually led behind hydro at 4.13%, not 2.08, and solar was at.23%, not.39%, so I'm curious where your numbers come from. Biomass: 1.48 Geothermal:.41% Solar:.23% Wind: 4.13% Actually adds up to 6%. To reach 18% we'd need to build 3x as much of 'all of the above'. To reach my goal(60%), we'd need 10X as much. 10X/3=3.33. I should have said 1/3rd, not 1/4, sorry. To reach my goal you 'only' need a 5 fold uptick on wind, not 100x, solar would be 100x, not 500x. I'm curious as to how you worked your math, because 100*2.08%= 208% of current generation, which means we'd be more than doubling our generation capability in wind alone.
Given that solar has had a relatively late start over wind, the fact is that it only needs another 4% of total generation over wind. That's a better way to look at it than goal percentage/current percentage = difficulty.
Biomass and geothermal would need around a 6X increase(they only need to hit ~12%). Of course, to outright state it again: There's a reason I said rough percentages. I'm not going to cry if the mix ends up being 50% nuclear, 15% wind, 10% solar, 25% 'other'. I also didn't state any real timeline, though 'sooner is better' should be implied. source
Pebble beds have been in operation since the 1980's and we still haven't made the jump.
I suggest you check your research. They've been testing/developing pebble bed reactors, but they've run into issues such that they're not replacements for rod type reactors yet.
Again, this is only >Human deaths. If you look at the full ecological impact that number is dramatically higher. As it is for coal and oil as well.
Where's the huge ecological impact for nuclear coming from? Like I said earlier, no argument from me about coal/oil. My point has always been not that nuclear is harmless, but that it's less harmful than the alternatives while still remaining affordable(minus political stuff).
I'd also love thorium-salt reactors. There's a reason why I mentioned 5 designs spread over 200 reactors - I want some experimentals in there that will hopefully become standard.
It's not that there's no problems. It's just that if you do an honest assessment that includes externalities nuclear beats coal hand over fist. They're mostly captured with nuclear plants, not so with coal.
Crops, fisheries, radioactive contamination, the whole system would lead to massive collapse after a decade. Sure, hardly anyone would die from the immediate impact of the annual nuclear meltdown, but once we start ticking off the body count of the millions dying to radiation poisoning and starvation, we might want to reconsider that path.
1. The total death impact from Chernobyl is roughly 4k people. There's some high end estimates like 985k, but those seem to assume that humans are snorting all the radioactive material. 2. The exclusion zone is 1k km, 1 a year would add up to 1M 'off limits', most of it indistinguishable from a natural park. About 2% of our land mass, assuming we don't smarten up and keep plants on previously 'disallowed' areas. 3. 1 Chernobyl/year is an absolute worst case scenario. Even if we multiplied our nuclear power 100 fold we wouldn't have that disaster rate, especially as we transition past the legacy plants the US uses now. 4. Estimates range from 4k to 93k deaths from the accident and resulting radiation. Meanwhile the death toll from coal in the USA alone is 10k..., and 170k world wide.
Right now, solar power in the US accounts for 0.39% of ALL power generated by the country (or 3% of total renewable energy generation). Right now, wind power in the US accounts for 2.08% of ALL power generated by the country (or about 16% of total renewable energy generation).
Electricity generation in the USA used to be zero. Lighting and such were done by flame type devices. There used to be zero automobiles, now there's more than 1 per adult in the country. Nuclear electrical generation used to be zero, now it's close to 20%.
Expecting a 500-fold uptake on solar and a 100-fold uptake on wind?
Sure, why not? Hawaii is a limited market and very much an ideal case for it, but look at how fast they're installing solar.
Your plan appears to call for approximately 1/4 the solar and wind mine does, how different is that really when you're complaining about the OOMs difference between my ideal and current production, when your ideal is less than an OOM different than mine?
Otherwise, you seem to like your.39% argument, as for your post from the last week. This comic works both ways. Sorry for taking so long to reply to it, by the way. Not sure how I missed it and I was busy that weekend.
people start coming home and cranking up their A/C and other appliances you reach peak electric use after solar has started its collapse.
The AC is at least solvable. If we install so much solar that prices are cheaper during the day you can have systems set up to chill your house during the cheap period so you still come home to a comfortable house, and keeping it cool should be generally easy at night without too much power.
Government policies like forcing utilities to buy back home-installed solar at retail price just exacerbates the problem as it overemphasizes the economic case for solar
Outside of Hawaii they aren't even touching baseload during the day yet. So it's a very 'eventual', because right now solar tends to displace more expensive peaking plants.
But I agree - the electricity market would change drastically somewhere between 20-30% of electricity produced by solar. I'd actually say massive changes seen at 20% is likely - at that point you're producing enough electricity by solar to negate the average difference between daytime and nightime consumption, as daytime tends use ~50% more power than night. At least in the USA.
How about 6Mw? That's practically neighborhood level. It's also so small that it could be placed close enough to businesses to be able to do things like provide district heating with the waste heat.
France runs a number of nuclear plants in a lead-following mode. It can be done.
Still, I'd stop at about 40% of our power being produced by nuclear.
Imagine what would happen if there were fewer ad companies around pushing more stuff into our face attempting us to buy the product they were hired to promote.
I had to look up the 1974 thing. I'll admit to being shocked. If there wasn't a valid reason for doing stuff like discounting a woman's income(probably already lower) by 50% when computing her limits, I can't help but think that if I went back in time to before 1974 I'd do the same thing as happened in 1975 - open a bank for women* that offers services that more accurately asses the risk, IE a lot cheaper for women, hiring female workers(for less, but still more than market), etc... and still make a killing as they all flock to my services!
*I couldn't call it a 'women's bank' because I'm not a woman.
efficiency isn't really relevant outside the amount of real estate needed to do the job.
I think you're mixing up efficiency and density of power/energy.
Remember that there's human costs tied up in generating the power in the first place - both capital in creating the equipment to do so*, and the maintenance required to keep it generating.
As such, a system that's highly efficient - it produces 90%+ of the energy you feed it back when you demand it, can actually be better even if it requires more human labor to keep it going, because it means that team x needs to get onto fewer roofs to install solar, and team Y needs to erect fewer wind turbines, and team Z doesn't need to build another nuclear plant.
I actually figure that Batteries might actually cut it. There's already massive battery banks in the power system. For example, Fairbanks has a 27Mw, ~6.75Mwh battery as part of the grid backup system. If Elon Musk gets his way with his 'gigafactory' for LiIon battery packs for Tesla, that's a stream of relatively huge batteries being produced for HALF the current price per kWh. That would be approaching lead-acid cost levels. Give them 10 years and they'll be entering the waste stream - but I figure a 85kWh pack will be replaced by the time it hits 60kWh. If, rather than recycling it immediately, what if we reuse it? The old pack should be pretty cheap, but let's say we use them as grid-connected UPS units, until they average out at ~40kWh. That's roughly a day of power usage for a household per EV battery we put towards it. Still at roughly 90% efficiency, which is a heck of a lot better than water's 50-60%.
i.e. until fossil fuels have to pay for the cleanup of the CO2 they are releasing it's simply not a fair comparison for renewable sources.
I'd look at a heck of a lot more than just CO2. Consider the effects of acid rain, especially back in the day - excess SO2 and NOx releases not only harmed people, it also harmed infrastructure. For the longest time living next to a coal power plant would give you the same odds of lung cancer as being a lifelong smoker.
And yes, by the time you force them to clean up their act(still cheaper than absorbing the resulting medical and social costs from the pollution) renewables look a lot better.
That becomes very expensive. Germany massively, massively subsidized solar and they're STILL looking towards building new coal plants to address increases in demand because nuclear isn't acceptable.
2.2 kTons of waste a year!!! Scary. Meanwhile a single coal plant averages something like 200k tons of sludge waste a year. 125ktons of ash.
"Spent nuclear fuel is about 95% uranium" - This means it's still 95% fuel. Reprocess the sucker! That would reduce your high level waste down to about 110 tons a year.
"extremely long half-life" = it's not very radioactive. Seriously, a substance with a halflife of half an hour might be able to cook you alive with a few grams. A substance with a half-life 100k times longer = 100k less energy during a given period of time*. It wouldn't even be 'hot' enough to kill tumors if implanted into them, like the radioactive seeds they stuck in my grandfather's prostate to kill his cancer.
If we started reprocessing we'd have enough fuel for a couple centuries without further mining.
*It's a little more complicated, but accurate within around an OOM.
The person, who has to be an expert and not some lay-person expressing a vague concern, submits the documented problem to the company and relevant safety organization.
The problem at it's worst was that I could write a letter to the EPA 'What about the 3 dotted tree-frog' and plant construction shuts down for a month before they figure out that the plant isn't even being built on '3 dotted tree-frog' territory. Or I express some crazy concern and again, construction has to stop until they address my 'concern'.
As for training costs - I don't think we need to follow 'military standards'. For the most part they're stupid outside of the actual skills necessary for running a nuclear plant, and I haven't seen too much in the way of accidents that can be put down to training. Keep in mind that 'in violation of all training' isn't something that can be fixed with more training...
On increasing mass production to reduce costs - we don't have enough volume right now, but I once figured out that we'd need about 200 new ~1GW plants in order to raise nuclear to 40% of the grid, eliminating coal power on the way and retiring most or even all of the current legacy nuclear plants. If they're all one of, say, 5 designs, that's 40 plants per, and who knows how many parts we can keep in common even between the 5 designs. That's enough to start seeing some economy of scale.
The EIR and lawsuits are the result of demanding perfection for what is inherently a very dangerous process with catastrophic consequences for any mishap and this is technically not possible. So it is a technical failure. You can design a system that will work perfectly most of the time. You can't design a system that will work perfectly all of the time.
"Inherently a very dangerous process" - If it was really so dangerous, why do we have more deaths because of steam accidents than nuclear ones? "catastrophic consequences for any mishap" - Bull. There only catastrophe for most mishaps in nuclear plants is the paperwork that has to be filled out as a result.
I agree with the last statement, but that's what redundancy is for. One failure is covered by another control. We need to balance risk and reward. Pollution from coal plants kills thousands of Americans, hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, every year. We'd save lives going nuclear even if we had a Chernobyl every year.
That being said, my 'ideal' non-fossil fuel electric grid ratio is roughly 40% nuclear, 20% solar, 20% wind, 20% 'other'. Nuclear provides baseload, solar covers the extra power demand of the day, 20% wind is about what we can support without extensive modification. Though the way things are going 30-10 in favor of solar might be more likely. Other includes hydro, geothermal, tidal, biomass, and such. It's most of your peaking power outside of the extra solar online during the day.
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I am talking about getting rid of at least 90% of coal usage and at least 50% of natural gas worldwide and 50% of oil too (to start with). So its not just the electrical grid, you also need the heating solution and transportation. We need that to fix climate change.
Ah, a change of topic. I was restricting myself to the electric grid, as I specified. As for the rest of it, I don't know what you think you're arguing with me about seeing as how I agree with it.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. Right now you can get a 250W panel for around $200. You should be able to generate around 438kWh from it a year(20% capacity factor). Or around $4.38 worth of electricity, which is a 46 year straight payoff(not worth it). If you pay 20 cents like some people, it's only a 23 year payoff(worth it).
A 22% increase in efficiency makes that 250W panel into a 305W one. 534kWh/year, $5.34 - 37 year payoff, which is barely not worth it, but you're looking at not needing to be paying on the highest end of the scale anymore for it to be worth it.
Who cares about efficiency? The only things that are relevant are: cost, space, amount of energy/power produced.
I'd say the guy performing the cost estimate, because efficiency at extraction is a key indicator to how much space you'll need to produce your target amount of power(or how much power your limited space can produce), which determines how much equipment you need to do it, which drives cost. That's without considering that if you need to purchase/lease/rent land or area rights there can be a cost there as well.
But as an executive deciding between different options, you're right.
Electricity is fungible - IE most people don't care where it comes from, so any one kWh is equivalent to any other.
Consider if Biodiesel is $3.50 and fossil diesel is $3. You're going to sell vastly more diesel than biodiesel. Make Biodiesel 22% cheaper and it's now $2.73. The situation will reverse practically overnight. More realistically what will happen is that investments in BD would languish until diesel hit $3.50, then plants would be built right and left, pushing down the price of both, but as process improvements decrease the cost of BD and capacity is increased even as fossil oil becomes harder to extract, that more and more BD would be sold even as FD sales decrease. Eventually FD would occupy more or less the same position as BD now.
To put it another way - alternative energy is very cliff-like - you don't notice much change until you actually fall of the cliff, then change happens very quickly. We're relatively close to the cliff right now. Hawaii is holding onto the old production model by it's fingernails. It's possible that very soon daytime electricity will be cheaper there than nighttime.
To avoid the chads problem I think we should stick with the 'fill in the bubble' or 'finish this line' type optical scanning ballots. Easier to write what counts and what doesn't, as well as easy for verification/counting by hand if necessary.
It's less about absolute accuracy than it is about being auditable.
Except you can't much go beyond 25% solar+wind with current tech.
Why not? Also, keep in mind that I'm talking about shutting down every single fossil fuel power plant, though some would be converted to biomatter plants. That's a massive game changer right there.
The idea is that at 20% solar covers the daytime increase in power usage. It should be installed such that, normally speaking, it only covers 50% of daytime usage. 20% wind is within reach without massive grid modification. My peaking/windless generators are the hydro and biomass plants. I would encourage the use of thermal storage systems though - bigger water heaters that operate only when electricity is at it's cheapest(most plentiful).
As for transmitting electricity for thousands of miles, at least in the USA you wouldn't have to. You would just 'trade off' production towards the area having a shortfall.
I think you are ignoring the fact that many countries have lots of hydro, like Brazil (70-80% of our electricity is hydro). Many other countries have over 50% hydro. The US alone about just as much hydro as nuclear (around 15%). Canada is close to 2/3 hydro.
Well, yes, I keep forgetting to put 'for the USA' into my statement. It also averages out to the world. Specific countries have different ideal setups. Brazil and Canada can keep using it's hydro and neglect solar in favor of wind. Hawaii and other equatorial islands can go nearly all solar. Alaska would probably end up being more nuclear(as I understand it our hydro prospects aren't that great).
Finally, I'll say there's a reason I said 'roughly'.
But then there is this other argument that somehow big reservoir hydro is bad. It takes too much land.
There's a lot more wrong with hydro than just 'takes too much land'. There's lots of ecological issues, which is why the USA is considered pretty much maxed out on hydro. It' also not zero CO2, it's really low, but making all that concrete does produce it. Plus you eventually have to dredge the lake to get rid of sediment build up.
It produces methane, the same stuff natural gas is made of.
For some reason this irks me. It's the same chemical as the majority of natural gas, IE CH4. NG tends to be a bit dirtier depending on how well they've filtered/cleaned it.
The big Germany solar push is a really stupid idea compared to a big solar push in South/Central America / Africa / Portugal / Spain / Middle East.
Southern half of the USA for that matter.
But much like big pharma isn't interested in cheap medicine, biomass doesn't have the billions in costs (hence doesn't have high profits). Its not a matter of national pride.
I think you're glossing over a number of issues. There are real-world concerns with the growth, harvest, processing(moisture removal), and delivery of biomass to the plants. There are also serious pollution concerns when you do a lot of it. Mostly fine particulates and NOx compounds. You have a very interesting outlook if you think that 'high costs' = 'high profits'. You get the highest net profits from high-gross profits combined with low costs - IE cheap to produced, sold high. Electricity is normally a standard in fungible goods - if you can produce it a cheaper way, that's the way to make a profit.
Huh, that made total sense when I wrote the post. What's captured? Costs. 'externalities' are costs that are not directly paid for by the company. Pollution is normally an externality because while it causes harm(which is a cost), it's imposed on others. Such as the population as a whole for air pollution, those downstream for water pollution, etc...
There's not a lot of external costs with nuclear power - the waste isn't going up the smokestack.
*sigh* --- I measure 'efficiency' by the amount of human effort it takes to run the machine. So, if the process can be automated and low maintenance....
What about the human effort required to make the machine? Or perhaps I'm expanding the scope of the machine you're looking at - beyond the storage system to also encompass the generation systems, because if you make the storage systems more efficient you need less generation, and on average that will indeed save you human effort if the extra efficiency isn't too expensive(in human labor and such).
Renewable biomass will expand (the largest portion of current non-Hydro renewables).
Geothermal will expand.
Wind will expand.
Solar will expand.
Geothermal is smaller than wind.
Actually no. My plan isn't calling for 1/4 of what yours is. Mine is looking at roughly a 3-4-fold increase across the board. What you're looking at is closer to a 500-fold increase for solar and 100-fold increase for wind.
Your target: 25%. Subtract the 7% hydro, because we both agree it's maxed: 18% remaining. .23%, not .39%, so I'm curious where your numbers come from. .41% .23%
Per the EIA, in 2013 wind actually led behind hydro at 4.13%, not 2.08, and solar was at
Biomass: 1.48
Geothermal:
Solar:
Wind: 4.13%
Actually adds up to 6%. To reach 18% we'd need to build 3x as much of 'all of the above'.
To reach my goal(60%), we'd need 10X as much. 10X/3=3.33. I should have said 1/3rd, not 1/4, sorry.
To reach my goal you 'only' need a 5 fold uptick on wind, not 100x, solar would be 100x, not 500x. I'm curious as to how you worked your math, because 100*2.08%= 208% of current generation, which means we'd be more than doubling our generation capability in wind alone.
Given that solar has had a relatively late start over wind, the fact is that it only needs another 4% of total generation over wind. That's a better way to look at it than goal percentage/current percentage = difficulty.
Biomass and geothermal would need around a 6X increase(they only need to hit ~12%). Of course, to outright state it again: There's a reason I said rough percentages. I'm not going to cry if the mix ends up being 50% nuclear, 15% wind, 10% solar, 25% 'other'. I also didn't state any real timeline, though 'sooner is better' should be implied.
source
A "natural park"? Really? Have you seen what the controlled area looks like?
Yes I have. Most of it's green. Like most northern areas if you take pictures at the right time you can get very dead looking terrain.
Let's see: Green grass, check, mold check, lichen check, green trees, check.
I whole heartedly disagree. A Chernobyl in Nebraska is a vastly worse case scenario.
That would be tough given that we pre-entomb our reactors in the USA.
These 60+ year old reactors have to be taken offline and replaced with modern technology.
Yeah, I've mentioned that a few times...
Pebble beds have been in operation since the 1980's and we still haven't made the jump.
I suggest you check your research. They've been testing/developing pebble bed reactors, but they've run into issues such that they're not replacements for rod type reactors yet.
Again, this is only >Human deaths. If you look at the full ecological impact that number is dramatically higher. As it is for coal and oil as well.
Where's the huge ecological impact for nuclear coming from? Like I said earlier, no argument from me about coal/oil. My point has always been not that nuclear is harmless, but that it's less harmful than the alternatives while still remaining affordable(minus political stuff).
I'd also love thorium-salt reactors. There's a reason why I mentioned 5 designs spread over 200 reactors - I want some experimentals in there that will hopefully become standard.
It's not that there's no problems. It's just that if you do an honest assessment that includes externalities nuclear beats coal hand over fist. They're mostly captured with nuclear plants, not so with coal.
Crops, fisheries, radioactive contamination, the whole system would lead to massive collapse after a decade. Sure, hardly anyone would die from the immediate impact of the annual nuclear meltdown, but once we start ticking off the body count of the millions dying to radiation poisoning and starvation, we might want to reconsider that path.
1. The total death impact from Chernobyl is roughly 4k people. There's some high end estimates like 985k, but those seem to assume that humans are snorting all the radioactive material.
2. The exclusion zone is 1k km, 1 a year would add up to 1M 'off limits', most of it indistinguishable from a natural park. About 2% of our land mass, assuming we don't smarten up and keep plants on previously 'disallowed' areas.
3. 1 Chernobyl/year is an absolute worst case scenario. Even if we multiplied our nuclear power 100 fold we wouldn't have that disaster rate, especially as we transition past the legacy plants the US uses now.
4. Estimates range from 4k to 93k deaths from the accident and resulting radiation. Meanwhile the death toll from coal in the USA alone is 10k..., and 170k world wide.
Right now, solar power in the US accounts for 0.39% of ALL power generated by the country (or 3% of total renewable energy generation).
Right now, wind power in the US accounts for 2.08% of ALL power generated by the country (or about 16% of total renewable energy generation).
Electricity generation in the USA used to be zero. Lighting and such were done by flame type devices. There used to be zero automobiles, now there's more than 1 per adult in the country. Nuclear electrical generation used to be zero, now it's close to 20%.
Expecting a 500-fold uptake on solar and a 100-fold uptake on wind?
Sure, why not? Hawaii is a limited market and very much an ideal case for it, but look at how fast they're installing solar.
Your plan appears to call for approximately 1/4 the solar and wind mine does, how different is that really when you're complaining about the OOMs difference between my ideal and current production, when your ideal is less than an OOM different than mine?
Otherwise, you seem to like your .39% argument, as for your post from the last week. This comic works both ways. Sorry for taking so long to reply to it, by the way. Not sure how I missed it and I was busy that weekend.
people start coming home and cranking up their A/C and other appliances you reach peak electric use after solar has started its collapse.
The AC is at least solvable. If we install so much solar that prices are cheaper during the day you can have systems set up to chill your house during the cheap period so you still come home to a comfortable house, and keeping it cool should be generally easy at night without too much power.
Government policies like forcing utilities to buy back home-installed solar at retail price just exacerbates the problem as it overemphasizes the economic case for solar
Outside of Hawaii they aren't even touching baseload during the day yet. So it's a very 'eventual', because right now solar tends to displace more expensive peaking plants.
But I agree - the electricity market would change drastically somewhere between 20-30% of electricity produced by solar. I'd actually say massive changes seen at 20% is likely - at that point you're producing enough electricity by solar to negate the average difference between daytime and nightime consumption, as daytime tends use ~50% more power than night. At least in the USA.
How about 6Mw? That's practically neighborhood level. It's also so small that it could be placed close enough to businesses to be able to do things like provide district heating with the waste heat.
France runs a number of nuclear plants in a lead-following mode. It can be done.
Still, I'd stop at about 40% of our power being produced by nuclear.
Imagine what would happen if there were fewer ad companies around pushing more stuff into our face attempting us to buy the product they were hired to promote.
I had to look up the 1974 thing. I'll admit to being shocked. If there wasn't a valid reason for doing stuff like discounting a woman's income(probably already lower) by 50% when computing her limits, I can't help but think that if I went back in time to before 1974 I'd do the same thing as happened in 1975 - open a bank for women* that offers services that more accurately asses the risk, IE a lot cheaper for women, hiring female workers(for less, but still more than market), etc... and still make a killing as they all flock to my services!
*I couldn't call it a 'women's bank' because I'm not a woman.
efficiency isn't really relevant outside the amount of real estate needed to do the job.
I think you're mixing up efficiency and density of power/energy.
Remember that there's human costs tied up in generating the power in the first place - both capital in creating the equipment to do so*, and the maintenance required to keep it generating.
As such, a system that's highly efficient - it produces 90%+ of the energy you feed it back when you demand it, can actually be better even if it requires more human labor to keep it going, because it means that team x needs to get onto fewer roofs to install solar, and team Y needs to erect fewer wind turbines, and team Z doesn't need to build another nuclear plant.
I actually figure that Batteries might actually cut it. There's already massive battery banks in the power system. For example, Fairbanks has a 27Mw, ~6.75Mwh battery as part of the grid backup system. If Elon Musk gets his way with his 'gigafactory' for LiIon battery packs for Tesla, that's a stream of relatively huge batteries being produced for HALF the current price per kWh. That would be approaching lead-acid cost levels. Give them 10 years and they'll be entering the waste stream - but I figure a 85kWh pack will be replaced by the time it hits 60kWh. If, rather than recycling it immediately, what if we reuse it? The old pack should be pretty cheap, but let's say we use them as grid-connected UPS units, until they average out at ~40kWh. That's roughly a day of power usage for a household per EV battery we put towards it. Still at roughly 90% efficiency, which is a heck of a lot better than water's 50-60%.
*I'm keeping it power agnostic.
i.e. until fossil fuels have to pay for the cleanup of the CO2 they are releasing it's simply not a fair comparison for renewable sources.
I'd look at a heck of a lot more than just CO2. Consider the effects of acid rain, especially back in the day - excess SO2 and NOx releases not only harmed people, it also harmed infrastructure. For the longest time living next to a coal power plant would give you the same odds of lung cancer as being a lifelong smoker.
And yes, by the time you force them to clean up their act(still cheaper than absorbing the resulting medical and social costs from the pollution) renewables look a lot better.
That becomes very expensive. Germany massively, massively subsidized solar and they're STILL looking towards building new coal plants to address increases in demand because nuclear isn't acceptable.
Just don't pile it all into the same 3 car garage. I'd start worrying about critical mass at that point... ;)
2.2 kTons of waste a year!!! Scary. Meanwhile a single coal plant averages something like 200k tons of sludge waste a year. 125ktons of ash.
"Spent nuclear fuel is about 95% uranium" - This means it's still 95% fuel. Reprocess the sucker! That would reduce your high level waste down to about 110 tons a year.
"extremely long half-life" = it's not very radioactive. Seriously, a substance with a halflife of half an hour might be able to cook you alive with a few grams. A substance with a half-life 100k times longer = 100k less energy during a given period of time*. It wouldn't even be 'hot' enough to kill tumors if implanted into them, like the radioactive seeds they stuck in my grandfather's prostate to kill his cancer.
If we started reprocessing we'd have enough fuel for a couple centuries without further mining.
*It's a little more complicated, but accurate within around an OOM.
What happens if someone discovers a flaw?
The person, who has to be an expert and not some lay-person expressing a vague concern, submits the documented problem to the company and relevant safety organization.
The problem at it's worst was that I could write a letter to the EPA 'What about the 3 dotted tree-frog' and plant construction shuts down for a month before they figure out that the plant isn't even being built on '3 dotted tree-frog' territory. Or I express some crazy concern and again, construction has to stop until they address my 'concern'.
As for training costs - I don't think we need to follow 'military standards'. For the most part they're stupid outside of the actual skills necessary for running a nuclear plant, and I haven't seen too much in the way of accidents that can be put down to training. Keep in mind that 'in violation of all training' isn't something that can be fixed with more training...
On increasing mass production to reduce costs - we don't have enough volume right now, but I once figured out that we'd need about 200 new ~1GW plants in order to raise nuclear to 40% of the grid, eliminating coal power on the way and retiring most or even all of the current legacy nuclear plants. If they're all one of, say, 5 designs, that's 40 plants per, and who knows how many parts we can keep in common even between the 5 designs. That's enough to start seeing some economy of scale.
The EIR and lawsuits are the result of demanding perfection for what is inherently a very dangerous process with catastrophic consequences for any mishap and this is technically not possible. So it is a technical failure. You can design a system that will work perfectly most of the time. You can't design a system that will work perfectly all of the time.
"Inherently a very dangerous process" - If it was really so dangerous, why do we have more deaths because of steam accidents than nuclear ones?
"catastrophic consequences for any mishap" - Bull. There only catastrophe for most mishaps in nuclear plants is the paperwork that has to be filled out as a result.
I agree with the last statement, but that's what redundancy is for. One failure is covered by another control. We need to balance risk and reward. Pollution from coal plants kills thousands of Americans, hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, every year. We'd save lives going nuclear even if we had a Chernobyl every year.
That being said, my 'ideal' non-fossil fuel electric grid ratio is roughly 40% nuclear, 20% solar, 20% wind, 20% 'other'. Nuclear provides baseload, solar covers the extra power demand of the day, 20% wind is about what we can support without extensive modification. Though the way things are going 30-10 in favor of solar might be more likely. Other includes hydro, geothermal, tidal, biomass, and such. It's most of your peaking power outside of the extra solar online during the day.