But that's just what's happening -- the complexity (and development time and cost) of the software is progressing exponentially. Microsoft's nightmare must be that the entropy and complexity of Windows has gotten beyond what they can handle. Reading the blogs, it appears they're trying various silver bullets (process, automated testing) that haven't solved the underlying problem.
Of course reprocessing is an issue with fast breeders, although metal fuels don't need to be reprocessed as often as oxide fuels. With burnup the fuel elements degrade and eventually have to be remanufactured and the wastes separated out.
It is almost certainly the case that new reactors built in the near future will be conventional thermal reactors, not fast reactors. The experience with liquid sodium cooled reactors has not been favorable, and the big selling point of breeders -- ability to continue to be operated when uranium prices become very high -- is no longer seen as important in the near term. Moreover, conventional reactors have thousands of reactor-years of experience behind them, so most of the bugs have been worked out. They are far down the learning curve of operating effectiveness as well, with high capacity factors and declining costs.
This is a nonstarter economically. It would be cheaper to burn fossil fuels and sequester the CO2 (since you are assuming the CO2 can be extracted from the air, sequestration could do that too for the CO2 produced by distributed users of the fuels.)
The price of natural gas is highly variable across the world (by more than a factor of ten) so the pricess in the US or UK are irrelevant. Natural gas, unlike petroleum, is difficult to transport. OF COURSE you wouldn't use US or UK natural gas to make FT diesel! You'd use Nigerian natural gas that's being flared off, or Siberian gas, or gas in Bangladesh, or other such places. These places don't have pipelines that can deliver the gas to markets paying those high prices -- that's what 'stranded' means.
The competitor with FT diesel for stranded gas is cryogenic liquefaction and transport. The cost of this has come down, but it's still not cheap. FT diesel does not require refrigeration or dedicated infrastructure on the receiving end, nor does it require long term contracts.
Why would it be a "disaster"? Really, expound on this a bit. All the proposed methods and techniques and crops are "wrong"?
Because it would cause very large areas to be replaced with unnatural monocultures instead of natural ecosystems. The underlying cause is the great inefficiency of photosynthetic energy conversion.
Biodiesel is fine as a boutique-scale touchy-feely fashion statement for those who don't think too much about what they are actually proposing. As a real solution to the problem of producing significant amounts of liquid fuel, it's a ghastly crime against nature.
What's wrong with using some of the huge quantities of biowaste produced every year to make fuel?
Well, aside from the fact that if organic waste is not recycled into the soil it can cause the soil to degrade, the biggest problem is that even if all of it were converted to fuel, it would not produce more than a small faction of fuel demand. US refineries produced about 125 billion gallons of gasoline in 2003; using all US corn stover (for example) for cellulosic alcohol production would produce maybe 12 billion gallons. And that's just gasoline, which accounts for just a third of the output of an oil refinery.
The pyrometallurgical approach leaves the new fuel even more radioactive than PUREX, since it's optimized the keep actinidies out of the waste stream, not fission products out of the recycled actinide stream. So the objection to getting 'hot' material in your fuel fabrication plant applies even more here. I suspect robotic handwaving is applied to wish this problem away on the powerpoint slides.
The spot market price for uranium has been around $30/lb. this year. It would have to increase by an order of magnitude or more for breeding and reprocessing to make economic sense. Just store the cooled spent fuel, folks -- it's not like armored dry casks are dangerous or particularly expensive.
This is one of the flaws of wind power -- the wind doesn't blow all the time, and (worse) you can't schedule the outages. This means the power is not 'dispatchable', which reduces the value of the power to the utility. Simplistically, since the utility needs to have backup capacity available, wind only displaces fuel costs, not capital costs. This is fine if it's displacing natural gas (if you were foolish enough to build too many gas-fired plants and then watched the price of gas skyrocket), but sucks if it displaces coal or nuclear, which have very low fuel costs.
You might think energy storage would save you, but storage is also expensive, so you end up adding more capital costs that way.
Reprocessing makes no economic sense at current uranium prices. It's cheaper to just let the spent fuel sit in shielded storage in case this changes in the future.
I think it can be established that there are plenty of practical renewable sources of power.
I think the UK government looked at them, and concluded that, no, they would not do the job. Solar isn't practical, particularly in the UK. Wave power is an engineering joke. Geothermal is too expensive. Hydro is at its limits. Biomass is inadequate. This leaves wind. Wind is fine if you are subsidized, don't care about aesthetics or littering the countryside with bird fragments, and have enough of other kinds of power to level the load when the wind isn't blowing.
They're going to build more reactors, or they're going to restart coal mining, or they're going to shiver in the dark. Or, I guess they could torpedo the economy with massive energy price increases, but somehow I don't see any rational politician doing that for long.
Bio-diesel, if produced in large enough quantities to be significant, would be an ecological disaster. Much better to let the enormous areas of land that would be needed lay fallow or remain in a wild state.
To satisfy ultra-low sulfur requirements, Fischer-Tropsch diesel makes more sense. Converting stranded natural gas capacity around the world to FT diesel production would add 4 million barrels of oil per day equivalent liquid fuel production.
It is nearly impossible to extract useful material from the spent fuel pebbles.
It's also impractical to extract useful materials from spent fuel rods of conventional reactors, unless you're running a weapons program and don't care about the cost. Pu from commercial reprocessed fuel is expensive to separate, and it has a negative value once you've separated it -- the extra hassle of designing your fuel fabrication plant to be able to handle Pu (which is much more radioactive than enriched uranium) dwarfs the cost of the uranium you save.
If you're concerned about uranium running out, the incremental approach will be to go to cycles with higher burnup and fuel efficiency. CANDU reactors are like this, particularly if used with thorium-uranium fuel elements.
Breeder reactors did not make the plutonium for weapons programs. A breeder reactor is a reactor that produces more fissionable material than it consumes. Weapons reactors do not do this. What they do is produce plutonium while consuming uranium; more U-235 is consumed than Pu is produced; however, the Pu has a smaller critical mass, and is easily separated from the fuel by purely chemical means.
There is a world scale project to develop fusion and every developed country in the world is currently participating (except the U.S.)
I believe the US rejoined the ITER project a few years ago. Whether that was a good idea is debatable, though; tokamaks are rather marginal economically.
In the US, nuclear plants weren't being built primarily because burning gas or coal was cheaper. But now, natural gas prices have skyrocketed, so that leaves coal. And coal is cheaper because the cost of the emitted CO2 is not being paid by the utility.
IMO, it's a crime against humanity to build new coal-fired baseload plants, yet that is happening.
Wind suffers greatly because the power is not reliable. As a result, it needs a backup power supply unless it's only a small fraction of the total mix. Hydro can be used for that backup, but beyond that it's fossil fuels, and the cost (including CO2 emissions) of providing that backup must be included in the cost of wind. Nuclear, on the other hand, can be depended on for baseload power.
A great deal of power is lost in transmission lines.
In the US, about 8% of the generated power is lost in the distribution system (lines, transformers, everything). Is that 'a great deal'?
Oh, and since the power in wind goes as the cube of wind speed, it makes sense to put wind turbines where the wind is strong, not where the consumers are. This also helps, to some extent, to smooth supply fluctuations (geographic diversity). So wind power is transmitted long distances just like centralized power.
Yup I dared mention the phrase that strikes terror into the Bush administration. It may amaze US motorists to discover that unlike the new Hummer, European cars have actually advanced their MPG since the Ford Model T.
The Hummer actually reflects an unintended side-effect of energy efficiency. Many energy efficiency improvements have been made in vehicles since the Model T (or even since before the 1970s 'energy crisis'). These improvements could be used to make cars of the same size that use less gas, or they could be used to make bigger cars that are still affordable. SUVs may not have become so popular if they got only 5 miles per gallon.
A similar thing happens with air travel. More efficient planes means cheaper fares which means more passenger miles. Or with lightning: if your light bulbs are more efficient and last longer, you tend to leave them on more. It's 'elasticity of demand' -- as the cost of the activity that consumes energy declines, more of that activity will occur.
Nuclear powerplant waste will decay down to the level of radioactivity in naturally occuring uranium in around 125 years or so.
This is wrong. Nuclear waste, if reprocessed and the actinides recycled, will decay down to the biohazard level of the original uranium in 600 to 1000 years. If you don't recycle the actinides, it takes much longer.
But the waste issue is a red herring. Put the spent fuel in armored dry casks after it's cooled a bit and seal them shut. They'll last for many centuries, even left on the surface. In the future the waste will be easy to deal with, probably by sending it into space once the cost of launch declines several orders of magnitude.
Forcing waste to be reprocessed now instead of in the future is, in effect, transfering wealth from us to our descendants. Since our descendants are likely to be far wealthier and more capable than ourselves it's like a very regressive tax.
Pesticides are manufactured in rather small volume that could be easily satisfied by renewable feedstocks. Fertilizer from fossil fuels is ammonia, where the fossil fuel is used to produce the hydrogen, typically by reaction of steam with methane; the hydrogen is then reacted with nitrogen at high pressure to make ammonia. Any other hydrogen source -- for example, electrolysis driven by nuclear or renewable, or hydrogen from gasified biomass -- would also do. These are not currently competitive, but they are doable.
But it's going to be a long time, if ever, before we have plants that are producing 200-carbon chains that we need for, say, high-density plastics.
Plastics are made by polymerization of rather simple monomers, not by extracting 200-carbon molecules from petroleum. Think about it: there's an enormous variety of different organic molecules with 200 carbons; any single one will be a tiny fraction of the mass of a barrel of oil (especially since that chemical will probably be solid and only slightly soluble in oil.)
Reserves are ores that are economically exploitable.
Reserves are ores that are economically exploitable and have been characterized (mapped, drilled, surveyed, assayed). They do not represent all the ore that can be extracted economically at a given price, only the fraction that we know about.
Solar power is, inflation-adjusted, a quarter the cost it was in the 1970s
The point I was making was not that PV prices won't come down, but that the gee-whiz silver bullet breakthroughs aren't what's been driving the price down. We still overwhelmingly use crystalline (and poly-xtal) Si, even after decades of hype about GaAs, a-Si, CuInSe2, CdTe, spheral, organic, etc. etc. cells.
So color me skeptical about the latest 'breakthrough'. Many, many attributes are necessary for a technology to be brought to market, and failing in just one of them will cause it to be left on the shelf.
False. For example SK's known deposits will be fully extracted in 25 years (Australia will last loner).
This comment reflects a common ignorance about natural resource economics. It costs a company money to characterize a mineral deposit. Unless that mineral deposit is mineable in a time scale of about 30 years, that money is wasted. So it's quite common to see only 30 years of reserves left in a mineral resource, even if the total quantity that can be found in the future is much larger.
Experts think there is much more uranium out there. According to John P. Holdren, the 'reasonably assured' terrestrial uranium resource is 100 million to 300 million tons at a price of $350/kg (about a factor of five higher than the current spot market price). Jacques Foos and team in France estimate seawater uranium (4 billion tons) can be extracted in the Gulf Stream for $210-260/kg using Japanese polymer adsorbant technology (this current carries 10 million tons of uranium per year.) (source: Garwin and Charpak, 'Megawatts and Megatons', pages 210-211.)
PV solar electricity is certainly more expensive than grid electricity. But PV will not go up in price. Grid electricity will, as oil becomes more expensive.
Almost all my electricity comes from coal and nuclear (with some gas); little comes from oil. There is an upper limit to how high it can go as the price of oil goes up, since if oil rises too much non-oil options will increasingly replace it in the powerplants where it still is used (the same is true of gas).
Prices will rise, but this will be largely due to inflation from monetary policy, not exhaustion of natural resources. Nuclear has actually been getting cheaper: the plants are operating at historically high capacity factors, and new plants will have lower capital cost (adjusted for inflation) due to experience and simplification and improved technology.
The cost of PV is also affected by expectations of inflation, since this increases the interest rate and that increases the financing cost (which is relevant even if you are paying cash, since it also reflects the investment income you could have earned elsewhere or the money you could have saved by paying down some other debt.)
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But that's just what's happening -- the complexity (and development time and cost) of the software is progressing exponentially. Microsoft's nightmare must be that the entropy and complexity of Windows has gotten beyond what they can handle. Reading the blogs, it appears they're trying various silver bullets (process, automated testing) that haven't solved the underlying problem.
Of course reprocessing is an issue with fast breeders, although metal fuels don't need to be reprocessed as often as oxide fuels. With burnup the fuel elements degrade and eventually have to be remanufactured and the wastes separated out.
It is almost certainly the case that new reactors built in the near future will be conventional thermal reactors, not fast reactors. The experience with liquid sodium cooled reactors has not been favorable, and the big selling point of breeders -- ability to continue to be operated when uranium prices become very high -- is no longer seen as important in the near term. Moreover, conventional reactors have thousands of reactor-years of experience behind them, so most of the bugs have been worked out. They are far down the learning curve of operating effectiveness as well, with high capacity factors and declining costs.
certain types of oil-yielding algae in special vertical tanks that won't impinge on valuable arable farmland.
The cost of the tanks will very likely render this uneconomical. Farmland doesn't have to be built, typically.
This is a nonstarter economically. It would be cheaper to burn fossil fuels and sequester the CO2 (since you are assuming the CO2 can be extracted from the air, sequestration could do that too for the CO2 produced by distributed users of the fuels.)
The price of natural gas is highly variable across the world (by more than a factor of ten) so the pricess in the US or UK are irrelevant. Natural gas, unlike petroleum, is difficult to transport. OF COURSE you wouldn't use US or UK natural gas to make FT diesel! You'd use Nigerian natural gas that's being flared off, or Siberian gas, or gas in Bangladesh, or other such places. These places don't have pipelines that can deliver the gas to markets paying those high prices -- that's what 'stranded' means.
The competitor with FT diesel for stranded gas is cryogenic liquefaction and transport. The cost of this has come down, but it's still not cheap. FT diesel does not require refrigeration or dedicated infrastructure on the receiving end, nor does it require long term contracts.
Why would it be a "disaster"? Really, expound on this a bit. All the proposed methods and techniques and crops are "wrong"?
Because it would cause very large areas to be replaced with unnatural monocultures instead of natural ecosystems. The underlying cause is the great inefficiency of photosynthetic energy conversion.
Biodiesel is fine as a boutique-scale touchy-feely fashion statement for those who don't think too much about what they are actually proposing. As a real solution to the problem of producing significant amounts of liquid fuel, it's a ghastly crime against nature.
What's wrong with using some of the huge quantities of biowaste produced every year to make fuel?
Well, aside from the fact that if organic waste is not recycled into the soil it can cause the soil to degrade, the biggest problem is that even if all of it were converted to fuel, it would not produce more than a small faction of fuel demand. US refineries produced about 125 billion gallons of gasoline in 2003; using all US corn stover (for example) for cellulosic alcohol production would produce maybe 12 billion gallons. And that's just gasoline, which accounts for just a third of the output of an oil refinery.
The pyrometallurgical approach leaves the new fuel even more radioactive than PUREX, since it's optimized the keep actinidies out of the waste stream, not fission products out of the recycled actinide stream. So the objection to getting 'hot' material in your fuel fabrication plant applies even more here. I suspect robotic handwaving is applied to wish this problem away on the powerpoint slides.
The spot market price for uranium has been around $30/lb. this year. It would have to increase by an order of magnitude or more for breeding and reprocessing to make economic sense. Just store the cooled spent fuel, folks -- it's not like armored dry casks are dangerous or particularly expensive.
only usable wind 30% of the time
This is one of the flaws of wind power -- the wind doesn't blow all the time, and (worse) you can't schedule the outages. This means the power is not 'dispatchable', which reduces the value of the power to the utility. Simplistically, since the utility needs to have backup capacity available, wind only displaces fuel costs, not capital costs. This is fine if it's displacing natural gas (if you were foolish enough to build too many gas-fired plants and then watched the price of gas skyrocket), but sucks if it displaces coal or nuclear, which have very low fuel costs.
You might think energy storage would save you, but storage is also expensive, so you end up adding more capital costs that way.
Reprocessing makes no economic sense at current uranium prices. It's cheaper to just let the spent fuel sit in shielded storage in case this changes in the future.
I think it can be established that there are plenty of practical renewable sources of power.
I think the UK government looked at them, and concluded that, no, they would not do the job. Solar isn't practical, particularly in the UK. Wave power is an engineering joke. Geothermal is too expensive. Hydro is at its limits. Biomass is inadequate. This leaves wind. Wind is fine if you are subsidized, don't care about aesthetics or littering the countryside with bird fragments, and have enough of other kinds of power to level the load when the wind isn't blowing.
They're going to build more reactors, or they're going to restart coal mining, or they're going to shiver in the dark. Or, I guess they could torpedo the economy with massive energy price increases, but somehow I don't see any rational politician doing that for long.
Bio-diesel, if produced in large enough quantities to be significant, would be an ecological disaster. Much better to let the enormous areas of land that would be needed lay fallow or remain in a wild state.
To satisfy ultra-low sulfur requirements, Fischer-Tropsch diesel makes more sense. Converting stranded natural gas capacity around the world to FT diesel production would add 4 million barrels of oil per day equivalent liquid fuel production.
It is nearly impossible to extract useful material from the spent fuel pebbles.
It's also impractical to extract useful materials from spent fuel rods of conventional reactors, unless you're running a weapons program and don't care about the cost. Pu from commercial reprocessed fuel is expensive to separate, and it has a negative value once you've separated it -- the extra hassle of designing your fuel fabrication plant to be able to handle Pu (which is much more radioactive than enriched uranium) dwarfs the cost of the uranium you save.
If you're concerned about uranium running out, the incremental approach will be to go to cycles with higher burnup and fuel efficiency. CANDU reactors are like this, particularly if used with thorium-uranium fuel elements.
Breeder reactors did not make the plutonium for weapons programs. A breeder reactor is a reactor that produces more fissionable material than it consumes. Weapons reactors do not do this. What they do is produce plutonium while consuming uranium; more U-235 is consumed than Pu is produced; however, the Pu has a smaller critical mass, and is easily separated from the fuel by purely chemical means.
There is a world scale project to develop fusion and every developed country in the world is currently participating (except the U.S.)
I believe the US rejoined the ITER project a few years ago. Whether that was a good idea is debatable, though; tokamaks are rather marginal economically.
In the US, nuclear plants weren't being built primarily because burning gas or coal was cheaper. But now, natural gas prices have skyrocketed, so that leaves coal. And coal is cheaper because the cost of the emitted CO2 is not being paid by the utility.
IMO, it's a crime against humanity to build new coal-fired baseload plants, yet that is happening.
Wind suffers greatly because the power is not reliable. As a result, it needs a backup power supply unless it's only a small fraction of the total mix. Hydro can be used for that backup, but beyond that it's fossil fuels, and the cost (including CO2 emissions) of providing that backup must be included in the cost of wind. Nuclear, on the other hand, can be depended on for baseload power.
A great deal of power is lost in transmission lines.
In the US, about 8% of the generated power is lost in the distribution system (lines, transformers, everything). Is that 'a great deal'?
Oh, and since the power in wind goes as the cube of wind speed, it makes sense to put wind turbines where the wind is strong, not where the consumers are. This also helps, to some extent, to smooth supply fluctuations (geographic diversity). So wind power is transmitted long distances just like centralized power.
Yup I dared mention the phrase that strikes terror into the Bush administration. It may amaze US motorists to discover that unlike the new Hummer, European cars have actually advanced their MPG since the Ford Model T.
The Hummer actually reflects an unintended side-effect of energy efficiency. Many energy efficiency improvements have been made in vehicles since the Model T (or even since before the 1970s 'energy crisis'). These improvements could be used to make cars of the same size that use less gas, or they could be used to make bigger cars that are still affordable. SUVs may not have become so popular if they got only 5 miles per gallon.
A similar thing happens with air travel. More efficient planes means cheaper fares which means more passenger miles. Or with lightning: if your light bulbs are more efficient and last longer, you tend to leave them on more. It's 'elasticity of demand' -- as the cost of the activity that consumes energy declines, more of that activity will occur.
Nuclear powerplant waste will decay down to the level of radioactivity in naturally occuring uranium in around 125 years or so.
This is wrong. Nuclear waste, if reprocessed and the actinides recycled, will decay down to the biohazard level of the original uranium in 600 to 1000 years. If you don't recycle the actinides, it takes much longer.
But the waste issue is a red herring. Put the spent fuel in armored dry casks after it's cooled a bit and seal them shut. They'll last for many centuries, even left on the surface. In the future the waste will be easy to deal with, probably by sending it into space once the cost of launch declines several orders of magnitude.
Forcing waste to be reprocessed now instead of in the future is, in effect, transfering wealth from us to our descendants. Since our descendants are likely to be far wealthier and more capable than ourselves it's like a very regressive tax.
Solar is 'viable' in the sense of 'an order of magnitude more expensive for baseload power, even if you ignore the cost of energy storage'.
Sure, it's usable for off-grid power. That, and $3.50, will get you a mocha at Starbucks.
Pesticides are manufactured in rather small volume that could be easily satisfied by renewable feedstocks. Fertilizer from fossil fuels is ammonia, where the fossil fuel is used to produce the hydrogen, typically by reaction of steam with methane; the hydrogen is then reacted with nitrogen at high pressure to make ammonia. Any other hydrogen source -- for example, electrolysis driven by nuclear or renewable, or hydrogen from gasified biomass -- would also do. These are not currently competitive, but they are doable.
... which don't do jack to remove CO2 from the flue gas. Shame about that.
But it's going to be a long time, if ever, before we have plants that are producing 200-carbon chains that we need for, say, high-density plastics.
Plastics are made by polymerization of rather simple monomers, not by extracting 200-carbon molecules from petroleum. Think about it: there's an enormous variety of different organic molecules with 200 carbons; any single one will be a tiny fraction of the mass of a barrel of oil (especially since that chemical will probably be solid and only slightly soluble in oil.)
Reserves are ores that are economically exploitable and have been characterized (mapped, drilled, surveyed, assayed). They do not represent all the ore that can be extracted economically at a given price, only the fraction that we know about.
The point I was making was not that PV prices won't come down, but that the gee-whiz silver bullet breakthroughs aren't what's been driving the price down. We still overwhelmingly use crystalline (and poly-xtal) Si, even after decades of hype about GaAs, a-Si, CuInSe2, CdTe, spheral, organic, etc. etc. cells.
So color me skeptical about the latest 'breakthrough'. Many, many attributes are necessary for a technology to be brought to market, and failing in just one of them will cause it to be left on the shelf.
This comment reflects a common ignorance about natural resource economics. It costs a company money to characterize a mineral deposit. Unless that mineral deposit is mineable in a time scale of about 30 years, that money is wasted. So it's quite common to see only 30 years of reserves left in a mineral resource, even if the total quantity that can be found in the future is much larger.
Experts think there is much more uranium out there. According to John P. Holdren, the 'reasonably assured' terrestrial uranium resource is 100 million to 300 million tons at a price of $350/kg (about a factor of five higher than the current spot market price). Jacques Foos and team in France estimate seawater uranium (4 billion tons) can be extracted in the Gulf Stream for $210-260/kg using Japanese polymer adsorbant technology (this current carries 10 million tons of uranium per year.) (source: Garwin and Charpak, 'Megawatts and Megatons', pages 210-211.)
Almost all my electricity comes from coal and nuclear (with some gas); little comes from oil. There is an upper limit to how high it can go as the price of oil goes up, since if oil rises too much non-oil options will increasingly replace it in the powerplants where it still is used (the same is true of gas).
Prices will rise, but this will be largely due to inflation from monetary policy, not exhaustion of natural resources. Nuclear has actually been getting cheaper: the plants are operating at historically high capacity factors, and new plants will have lower capital cost (adjusted for inflation) due to experience and simplification and improved technology.
The cost of PV is also affected by expectations of inflation, since this increases the interest rate and that increases the financing cost (which is relevant even if you are paying cash, since it also reflects the investment income you could have earned elsewhere or the money you could have saved by paying down some other debt.)