Turn a factory on full power when the wind is blowing and slow it down when the wind isn't.
What in the hell are you on about? Is a car factory supposed to slow down or stop dead for a few days every month simply because the wind isn't blowing? What's that going to do to their materials supply and product shipments? And what about the lost production time and wages that have just been blown into the wind, quite literally? I've heard lots of arguments about intermittency from outright denial that there's a problem to handwaving and hypothesizing about non-existent technology to address it, but suggesting that industry just stop due to bad weather, well, that just takes the cake.
Pumping water reservoirs is done all over Europe, without flooding vast areas, as it simply uses already existing glacial areas that were created by similar processes to begin with.
Except there are nowhere near enough of those natural reservoirs available for any appreciable amount of large-scale storage, hence why there are projects like Jachenau, Osser and Atdorf. All of these installations are constructed by excavation of a large volume of elevated mountain terrain, reinforcing it with concrete and leak-tight materials to prevent natural embankment weathering and/or catastrophic dam failure and flooding them.
Newer designs actually promise a lot more, given the ever advancing march if science.
No advancements in engineering and materials science can ever hope to circumvent the laws of physics. Flywheels are simply an extremely shitty way of storing vast amounts of energy long-term. For frequency regulation, okay. But for storing TWh's worth of energy, it's insanely expensive. This is the Beacon Power (who went bankrupt, btw) Stephentown flywheel energy storage and frequency regulation plant that can store all of 5 MWh worth of energy (about 1 large wind turbine for 1 hour). Meanwhile, in reality, in order to be able to smooth out solar production, you'd need at least 3-4 day's worth of nearly the whole freakin' grid's power. Just to store one 1GW nuclear reactor's equivalent production for one day you'd need about 5000 of such flywheel storage plants.
These are not made up figures. Here I've taken actual whole-German power production figures from Dec 2013 and blown them up 5x simulating a buildout of their current ~35 GW of wind & ~30 GW of solar installed capacity to insanely high levels (to a total of 325 GW of nameplate installed capacity - actual current total nameplate installed capacity in Germany is ~180 GW) and analyzed the shortfall. It'd still require ~550x the largest pumped hydro storage plant that exists in Germany (Goldisthal, which cost a cool 600 mil Euros, so just multiply to get a feel for the capital cost on top of the 5x wind & solar buildout). I didn't even need to be very picky about the month, as the same situation repeated itself on the very next month of Jan 2014. Now imagine you wanted to meet just 10% of this storage requirement using flywheels - that'd be on the order of 466 GWh, or about 100000 of the Stephentown flywheel energy storage plants, taking up ~1000km^2 just for the freakin' plants.
So energy storage seems a dynamite idea, but it's only when you start to run the numbers that you begin to realize the scale of the problem involved and how laughable some of the proposed solutions are.
As for the shuttle, to split hairs, I never specified it stored the flywheel energy for electrical purposes. Reaction mass is energy, too. But I yield to your point, that I should have been more specific. The main point was, that it can store energy for weeks without significant losses, anyway.
You're not splitting hairs, you're just covering your ass for being dead wrong. At no point did the shuttle use flywheels for any kind of energy storage or energy source. Just admit that you were wrong and move on.
Even Liquid salt reservoirs with just 6h of time are already enough to cover a night during the shorter nights of the year.
Have a look at the graphs of power production graphs I posted above again. I didn't make these up, they're actual production figures. Then understand that 6h doesn't even begin approach the
This is actually the most economical and it's still unbelievably expensive, not to speak of the impact on nature (large-scale flooding of previously unflooded areas) and unavailability in most places in sufficient quantities.
Splitting hydrogen and oxygen from water
This is already being exploited in a much more sensible process where we produce natural gas from the hydrogen and some CO2 sources. The process is expensive, has low efficiency (~25%) and requires that you still maintain a fleet of natural gas plants equivalent to almost all of your daily needs. Pumped hydro is actually cheaper. Also, imperfect piping and methane leaks can lead to quite substantial GHG emissions.
Spinning up large-mass, high-velocity, low-drag flywheels
None of these systems are meant for long-term storage. They're used to smooth out a fluctuating power supply on a second-by-second basis.
(it's how the venerable Shuttle stored energy for its week long missions)
No, the Shuttle used hydrogen fuel cells. You're confusing it with reaction wheels, which are used for maintaing attitude control.
Storing the energy in the electrical network itself
The electrical grid doesn't work that way. Yes, the grid has a bunch of electrical inertia, but nowhere near the amount needed to provide backup for any sensibly usable amount of time (hence why rotating masses are used for smoothing).
Heating liquid salt reservoirs
At present these top out at around 6h of run time, so about 1-2 orders of magnitude lower than what's needed. Also, they are mightily expensive. Add 72 hours of salt storage to your friendly solar plant and you'll see its cost fly through the roof.
The question is: WHEN do we get off our collectives asses, are ready to pay a bit more for power for 10-20 years and then get rid of the problem entirely
The answer is: never. For every 1 rich person you see on the planet, who can afford to overpay for energy, there's 5-6 people who can't. They too want electricity. And guess what they'll do to get it.
In IFR the cladding is loose-fitting, so the spent fuel is extracted from that. Since it isn't oxidized but is instead in pure metallic form, no oxide reduction step by way of an acid bath is necessary. The fuel pellets are simply melted and gaseous fission products are driven off. Next the molten mass is placed in a molten salt bath and an electroplating process extracts uranium and plutonium in metallic form onto an electrode (along with a little bit of fission products - this is serves as radiation shielding, preventing theft). These are then extracted and recast into new metallic fuel rods in an injection casting step. Finally, the new fuel rods are reinserted into cladding tubes, filled with sodium and welded shut. The fission products are then vitrified in glass and sealed in dry casks for storage. What's interesting in relation to thorium reprocessing is that this isn't a theoretical process. It's been demonstrated 20 years ago and we know how to do all of the detailed steps around it. Sure you can always find improvements (like switching from a borosilicate glass to an iron phosphate glass), but the technology is ready for commercial deployment. For more details, see the ANL article on pyroprocessing. Thorium has its place for sure, but in terms of technology that's ready to deploy today, fast breeders are that technology.
As for further developments on fast reactor technology, TerraPower's reactor is a really neat approach to fast breeders, because it avoids the reprocessing step entirely, instead doing it by being really smart about their cladding design and reshuffling their fuel geometry continuously to keep the neutron economy optimal.
I would agree that the regulatory environment in the west is hell-bent on killing any and all new projects, but you really can't blame them for being super-duper careful, as they have a hysterical public to deal with who perceive any failure, however small, as a catastrophe, thanks in large part due to media hype and fear mongering by news outlets and environmental groups. In Russia and China, meanwhile, the public realize that realistically it's either nuclear, with its occasional potential radiation release when it goes wrong (which can kill people, no doubt about it) vs. coal and natural gas, which kill people even when operating right and make places like Beijing look like freakin' Silent Hill.
As for IFR, no, the fuel isn't molten in the core, they're still solid fuel rods. The important difference for IFR fuel is that it's a pure metal, not an oxide, so its heatconductivity is much higher, which in turn allows higher temperature operation without stressing the material so much (as internal temperatures are far lower than the 1000C gradient experienced in oxide fuels). From this design decision, tons of other important features are derived, like the very strong negative temperature reactivity coefficient, the passive heat removal, ease of reprocessing (no more acid processes), etc. It's really quite an elegant design and it's ready to roll today.
And the spurious crap like [...] wind power is too intermittent
Indeed, who could ever present such slanderous accusations? Oh wait, how about actual grid measurements? (Aggregate German whole-grid performance numbers from Dec 2013 broken down by source.)
You made the very basic error of comparing nameplate capacity. You also need to consider capacity factor, which for solar in UK latitudes is around 0.1 - 0.15, whereas the EPRs that they plan to construct here are 0.9. So taking that into account, your 13 GW utility scale solar suddenly shrinks to <2 GW, whereas the nuclear plant is still around 3 GW. So before we even get to dispatchability of the power source and seasonal loading, solar loses by about 1/3 to the most wildly overpriced nuclear power plant I've ever seen in my life. Next you need to consider that the nuclear plant is planned to operate for 60 years, whereas the solar plant is most likely going to need replacement after 30 or at most 40 years. Finally, the $27B cost of the plant seems to me to be wildly out of whack with what these very same reactors cost in places like China (cheaper by about a factor of 4x). Meanwhile Russia is also building modern VVER-1200s at an equivalent cost of 4x cheaper than the plant in the UK. Make of this what you will, but it appears to me that the western world is losing its industrial prowess and losing it fast.
EDF say 20-25 years but then go on to say that the wind turbines built 30 years ago are still going strong.
Wind turbine life depends on how many hours of runtime they get - this strongly depends on the local conditions. A modern turbine is designed to run for ~120000 hours. Divide by 8760 hours in a year and you get about 14 years. Obviously, it's not always windy to run it, so you get more. It's basically a function of the capacity factor and the environment. An offshore unit has to deal with a lot more wear and tear since it runs more often, is in harsher sea conditions, and is in a high-moisture salty environment (not to speak of a large part of it being permanently submerged). As for the turbine running for 30 years, it's a 30 kW unit, like this one - hardly a big accomplishment. You know the average maintenance run on these things is 30 days, right? Do you think you could keep a car running for 30 years if you service it every 30 days? Also google for gearbox reliability of wind turbines - it's a big thing with them as the larger units start to accrue some age.
In any case, age isn't really such a big problem for machinery that's properly maintained. Reactors originally designed for 30 year run times are expected to be able to go up to 60 and possibly more. Modern reactors have been outright designed for a 60 year lifetime and might last a lot longer, but it cannot be relied upon when doing an analysis, which is why I take the manufacturers at their words (Westinghouse AP1000 is rated for 60 years and most wind turbines for 20-25 years, as you say).
Like the Brookings Study you seem to ignore the large amount of energy that mining, transporting and processing the nuclear fuel requires.
I didn't, I used the reference you posted (remember: "According to Sovacool's analysis" is what you wrote), which listed nuclear as 66 gCO2e/kWh over its whole lifecycle and wind as 10 gCO2e/kWh. I then proceeded to show how, using their own numbers for the construction carbon footprint of nuclear, wind was flatly underestimated. Nuclear's 66 gCO2e/kWh footprint is supposed to be 12% construction, or ~8 gCO2e/kWh, yet a wind plant of equivalent production capacity would need around 10x as much in construction materials, so saying wind is 10 gCO2e/kWh in total is a little dishonest to say the least. Don't complain when you use bad references.
Humans have shown themselves to utterly incapable of handling nuclear power without making a mess of it.
Have a little faith in the human species. Objectivelly, we've actually had a pretty good half century with it, especially if you compare our track record with coal which kills in a week about as many as nuclear has killed in all of its 60 year history, considering the best scientific evidence we have for the excess casualties that will be caused by Chernobyl and Fukushima fallouts (~4500 excess deaths) - I do hope you're not one of the conspiracy nuts who thinks the UN, WHO and UNSCEAR are all in cahoots with the nuclear industry, the Soviet authorities and probably the Illuminati or whatever. The reason why the general public is still mostly neutral to coal and natural gas and frowns on nuclear is because coal & gas only ever kill a few people at a time, which is highly politically preferable, plus nuclear has this enigma factor, which the media love to hype for fear (fear sells news). If you don't believe me, ask yourself whether people are more rational to be afraid of flying in planes instead of driving cars.
Sooner or later renewables will be the only option, we might as well start big with it now whilst we still have alternatives as a temporary backup.
And what will we be backing them up with when they reach, say, 5x their current built-out in high-RE countries like Germany? I've actually run the numbers and there isn
First off, you didn't provide a link, but that aside, I find the number Sovacool has calculated to be wildly bogus. Let's play around with that 66 gCO2e/kWh figure (using this as a shorthand for the percentages).
They calculated that construction accounted for 12% of the 66 figure, so about 8 gCO2/kWh. They quote a 1GWe PWR as requiring "170,000 ton of concrete, 32,000 ton of steel, 1363 ton of copper, and a total of 205,464ton of other materials". So let's play around with that figure a bit. At a cap factor of 0.8 (fairly average for nuclear. I know they quoted 0.66, but that's comparing nuclear from 30 years ago to renewables today, which is dishonest), that's 800 MW 24x7 for the PWR. How many wind turbines would that need to provide? Well, even assuming a very neat cap factor of 0.35 for wind (almost unobtainable on land), we'll need 326 of these babies (I'm using a 7.5MW turbine instead of 1.5MW because that's what I have materials data on - this is, if anything, favorable for wind, as materials overhead per MW is smaller with larger turbines), which aggregated together, would mass almost 1.6 million tons of concrete, 105 thousand tons of steel and other metals for the machine housings and generators and ~110 thousand tons of GRP fiberglass epoxy resin for the blades (and guess where those plastics come from). This is multiple times more material than is needed for the nuclear plant and considering wind turbines are designed to last ~20 years not the 40-60 years as nuclear plants are, the impact would be much more dramatic, yet the paper lists onshore wind as 10 gCOe/kWh with a straight face. On construction alone an equivalent wind farm would probably exceed nuclear over all of its lifecycle, even using their own figures.
Seems China does a much better job. Both Sanmen 1 and Haiyang 1 (both AP1000s) are expected to come online this year, on budget and on schedule. Taishan 1 and Taishan 2 (Areva EPRs) are also reported on schedule for startup this/next year (depending on how well their testing is gonna go). The EPRs are an especially impressive accomplishment, since those are the most powerful reactors ever built (1650 MWe). This seems to support OP's assertion that if you go into the project determined for success, push hard and don't let NIMBYs distract you, things can happen as planned. Seriously, if you want to see the state of the art in nuclear, look at China, they are moving fast. My guess is they're wanna accumulate as much experience running those reactors as possible and going forward standardize on a winner and pump them out like crazy to reduce their air pollution and GHG emissions. They're also running a few modern Russian VVER-1000s, which the IAEA referred to as the world's "safest" (I guess this remains to be seen, but from a technology perspective I gotta admit, they've done an excellent job).
Wow, your response to me showing that your source wasn't peer-reviewed is "bah, peer-review is worthless anyway, slashdot proves it!" At least you're honest in your science denial. You also conveniently forgot that I actually posted a few links that do more than just accuse the authors of not submitting to peer-review, but instead point out their use of unreliable sources, unproven or disproven dose-response models and excessive extrapolation, all of which will earn you a royal F- and the following loss of credibility in any academic setting. I also showed you how Sherman, the book's translator and promoter, data mined monthly CDC mortality data to draw a completely bogus conclusion, which fails even basic attempts at checking against the original data source and clearly shows the researchers' deliberate data manipulation.
But hey, once you're into science denial, hearsay obviously trumps mountains of carefully examined epidemiological data. I hope you're proud sitting next to your creationist, global warming-denying, geocentrist, flat-earther peers.
Publications without peer-review cannot be trusted to have been critically scrutinized by experts in the field.
The amount of dead in Chernobyl we never will know as late deathes can not objectively accounted to it.
So you're saying that we might as well guess at it? Actual research has been and is being conducted into this. What you're proposing isn't science, it's religion.
Just ask one living there?
As I said, at best it would demonstrate that misinformed people are giving other people misinformation. If you had asked around in the 15th century, you could have gotten people to wholeheartedly and with utter conviction attest to having seen witchcraft, but that doesn't mean witchcraft is real.
They certainly support your 'believes'.
You talk about hearsay and poorly researched pseudoscience. I meanwhile give you links to actual peer-reviewed research papers, real data and direct evidence. And I'm the one who has "beliefs"? I'm not writing this to insult you, but you seem awfully like one of the "feelies" who will deny science if it contradicts their feelings on a subject, be it climate change or GMOs or nuclear power for that matter.
perhaps i should have been clearer on my use of that article as reference. i have not (and have no real interest) in compiling all the data sources i have learned from which create the mosaic.
Translation: I have no evidence.
the truth, as it usually is - is blatantly obvious.
Translation: don't think about it, use intuition.
i listed it after a 5 second google search to at least turn any open-minded readers onto the possiblity of additional information.
Interestingly, your response, which probably took longer than 5 seconds to compose, didn't include any of that copious information.
as far as ridiculing something, well, you seem more interested in attacking the source rather than content
I did ready through your links. One was a reader comment by an accountant formerly working at GE and another was an opinion piece which only most hypothetically mentioned Fukushima in a single sentence.
i do however, encourage anyone who sees an uncanny coincidence in the timing of the action
You mean like they waited for over 3 years since the accident and changed governing parties once during that time before choosing to push it through? Seriously, at this point I'd be more suspicious of the US' influence here, since it's the US that heavily lobbied for this law and they're the ones who love cracking down on whistleblowers (plus the Japanese government is best buds with them).
I'm not arguing that this law is good, I think it's an appalling law. All I was doing is ridiculing the OP for linking a law with the Fukushima disaster simply because it's from the same country with no evidence to back it up (OP's link only presented the law with no evidence that it's intended use is for Fukushima and your links were just speculation submitted to the paper by a reader and an opinion piece). And you know what they say of arguments presented without evidence. The debate around the disaster needs to be a lot more rational and a lot less alarmist and conspiratorial. Trouble is, fear sells papers, so I don't see an end in sight.
Seriously, you're citing opinion pieces (in the latter link) and COMMUNITY COMMENTS (in the former link) as evidence that this is purpose of the law? Can I also cite any old Internet yokel's comments as long as they appear on the domain of a news site?
Care to point out which experimental reactor blew up? To my knowledge no gen 3 or gen 4 prototypes blew up or cracked. As to the pebble that got stuck in the THTR-300, it was a terrible design, no doubt about it, because:
Pebble bed reactors have extremely large numbers of moving parts, the exact opposite of reliable.
It used high-pressure helium for coolant, of which there isn't much on the planet and on scale-up it would almost certainly cause shortages.
I have to agree with Bill Gates here again, in that modern computer modeling is a night and day difference between then and now. Back when the THTR-300 was designed (construction started in 1971, so design was done in the mid 60s), this(*) was the state of the art in supercomputers and this was still the most common way of solving mathematical problems and so people could not help but make bad decisions that had to be tested and failed experimentally. Nowadays we can digitally simulate to extreme minutiae the conditions that designers back then could only guess at. Today the uncertainty in reactor design isn't in the thermodynamics part anymore - we've got that down pretty well by now - it's in the materials science and how materials respond over time to various environments, i.e. our simulation granule has shrunk considerably from being whole subsystems of the plant to almost the molecular level. To claim that nuclear designs can't work because there were mistakes made 40 years ago is the same as to say that hydrogen fuel cells can't work, because look at what happened to Apollo-13.
(*) "With performance of about 1 megaFLOPS, the CDC 6600 was the world's fastest computer from 1964 to 1969,"
Since 'the incident' the police is knocking on doors of young couples living in the Fukushima area and in the fall out zones north east of it, telling the couples: " you know, you should consider to have no children" (Or move away to the far south or Hokkaido)
Can you actually show this, or is this just the latest of the tall tales making its rounds on the anti-nuclear blogosphere? And anyway, even if it did happen in some form, all it would show is that people are afraid and giving each other potentially poor advice. It doesn't show that they're at actual substantial risk of harm, otherwise you could go around telling everybody to stay indoors to prevent them from being run over by cars (you know, this we can actually show to happen).
In Chernobyl the death toll over all is estimated to be a million, roughly./. posters claim it was 3 or 5...
Ugh, not that rag again. Yablokov's publication is a book, not a peer-reviewed scientific paper. It contains tons of errors and was translated and pushed onto the New York Academy of Sciences by known anti-nuclear crazies who aren't above outright falsehoods (like their assertions that Fukushima killed 15000 people in US in the initial 14 weeks after the accident, even though their data is trivially shown to have been manipulated and utterly bogus; Mangano is often seen publishing together with another crazie, Sherman, and they've even been torn a new one by an avid linear-no-threshold-supporting researcher). The Yablokov publication has since been criticized by the NYAS and they've distanced themselves from it. The short story is that the NYAS' reputation was co-opted as a vehicle to fluff up the credibility of an utterly bogus piece of non-scientific writing by anti-nuclear activists.
I witnessed 1986 about a few ten thousand... it was news every day on TV. I really wonder how people in our days with straight face claim only a few people died.
Oh my, so if something's on TV, it is truth! Well fire the scientists then, obviously all we need to do to determine fact from fiction is to listen to the daily news cycle. Fox News will be pleased.
Luckily the initial disaster in Fukushima was far away from this. However the long term issues we only will know in 30 years... plus.
Even assuming the fairly uncontended (mainly in anti-nuke cycles) linear-no-threshold dose response model, according to actual peer-reviewed studies, on average we'd expect ~250 excess deaths over the years with an upper bound of ~2500 (and that's assuming no evacuations). Was the accident harmless? Certainly not. Should TEPCO be made to compensate people for their troubles? Absolutely! But this fear mongering using junk science is in no way different to global-warming deniers and 9/11 truthers simply ignoring scientific facts to meet their political agendas. Do be like them.
law in japan effectively gags anyone from talking about fukushima in an honest way
Wow, that's some beautiful mental gymnastics there, going from a law intended to protect government/military secrets and lobbied for heavily by the US and linking that to Fukushima. Don't forget to stop by the booth and pick up your tinfoil medal.
An out-of-pile corrosion test program was carried out for Hastelloy-N which indicated extremely low corrosion rates at MSRE conditions. Capsules exposed in the Materials Testing Reactor showed that salt fission power densities of more than 200 W/cm3 had no adverse effects on compatibility of fuel salt, Hastelloy-N, and graphite. Fluorine gas was found to be produced by radiolysis of frozen salts, but only at temperatures below about 100 C.
Operating it will also be a nightmare. Can you put a diver into molton salt to fix things?
What the? Why would you go for a dive in a super-heated radioactive salt at above 500 C? Below ~400C the salt solidifies, so no, you can't go dive in it any more than you can go for a dive in a salt mine. Moreover, I think you misunderstand the design of the core region of most molten salt reactors. They aren't great big tanks which you can move around in. Most are designed as a series of narrow tubes which the salt is pumped through, lined by moderator (typically graphite), all surrounded by a neutron reflector (usually heavy steel). Molten salt reactors are projected to be cheaper precisely because they don't require super-large forged pressure vessels. Regardless, even fairly large (in terms of capacity) PWR pressure vessels aren't really that big that you'd send a diver into it, even assuming anybody ever did that (fuel is loaded by crane from the top while the pressure vessel is open and completely submerged in water).
"expected effect: increased fossil fuel emissions due to sporadic running". Not sure what this is supposed to mean.
There are many problems with running thermal power plants, especially those with large boilers, sporadically, because they have lots of thermal inertia. For example, a lignite power plant has a minimum output level of ~30% - that's just a limitation of the thermodynamics of the system. If at a given point there's too much renewable capacity on the grid, the plant operator is forced to shut down completely. If, however, at some later point, say 6-8 hours later, renewables lapse again, the coal plant operator is told to perform a restart, but with a large coal plant it's not that simple to just load in new coal and throw in a match. They need to reheat the furnace, because otherwise the coal just won't burn. To reheat say a 600 MW lignite plant takes ~100000 liters of fuel oil - that's vaporized and blown into the furnace and burned and only after that the first coal can start to come in. All of the created CO2 and extra cost for the plant operator goes up the smoke stack and hasn't produced a single kWh. This is true, though to a lesser degree, for CCGT as well - large thermal inertia of the boiler and reheat system that is lost every time it's shut down and restart. The only guys who don't suffer from this significantly is OCGT, but they have terrible CO2 emissions per kWh compared to CCGT.
That Germany did not improve its CO2 emission despite a massive investment in renewables is primarly because they decided shut down nuclear power first rather than coal. A reduction is expected for the future when renewables start to replace fossil instead of nuclear.
If you have a look at the CO2/kWh graph I sent you, you'll notice that the reduction trend line starts in 1990 and the renewable buildout somewhere around 1999 and it hasn't really had much of an effect on the figure. In fact, when I do a linear fit on the first derivative of the CO2/kWh data, it appears as though the reduction trend will be slowing down an
My point is that France's electricity is cheap because the government pays so it cannot be used as argument why nuclear is cheap did.
Care to demonstrate this? Also, Germany's renewable sector is also heavily subsidized, so even if I accepted that France's electrical production (not R&D - that's a whole different story) is subsidized, you could at best say that both countries do production subsidies. Even then the French are getting the better end of the deal with lower rates.
An LFTR is an *engineering* nightmare.
I presume you've worked on LFTR engineering then? Can you name some of the engineering nightmarish points?
while renewables are already competitive and getting cheaper every year.
Oh really? Without a guaranteed feed-in tariff and market distortion by forcing the grid operator to take renewables first and make the rest of the traditional generators pay for their intermittency? I had a look at a fairly large project in Germany, Solarpark Meuro and it is quoted at 140 million Euros for the first 70 MW installed. Naively you'd recalculate that to be 2000 Euros per kW, compare to nuclear (which costs more per kWh) and declare victory. Except that's not an honest comparison. Nameplate capacity on a solar plant is not the same as on a nuclear plant due to capacity factor. Solar in Germany has CF ~0.15, whereas nuclear is >0.9, often even 0.95. So to replace one nuke plant kW of capacity you'd need to install ~6x that amount in solar, so it's no longer 2000 Euros per kW, it's more like 12000 Euros per kW. But the story doesn't end there. Solar isn't dispatchable, so you need to add the cost of backup storage into that. And when it's winter and your solar insolation drops by a factor of 5-6x, your solar system is again effectively completely useless and you need yet another plant to produce (so potentially yet another X-amounts of kW to backup your solar array). And then when these things are diffuse and in different locations (solar good in the south, wind good in the north and presumably storage somewhere in the middle) you'll need transmission capacity. etc. etc.
These dishonest price per MW of installed nameplate capacity comparisons really bug me, because those making them don't understand that they're making a dishonest comparison.
Economically, investing in nuclear is a poor decision.
So just for kicks I've taken data from IEA's CO2 Highlights 2013 catalog (+one real-time data point for 2013 from RTE) for France and plotted them against data from Germany's Umweltsbundesamt and this is what you get. Notice how the renewable share (and that includes hydro) gets larger faster than CO2 per kWh decreases? In recent years, in fact, it has jumped up, because the German grid is experiencing an expected effect: increased fossil fuel emissions due to sporadic running. Even if we extrapolate out to 2056 you'll see that German CO2/kWh is still ~2.5x higher than present-day French emissions (and the French are working on lowering those even further - this year they've announced they managed to halve it by running fossil plants less & running nuclear and hydro plants more).
The second graph is taking data from co2benchmark.com for all European countries for the year 2008 and plotting their CO2/kWh emissions versus various energy sources and their compositions. If you have a look at the R^2 factor you'll notice that the strongest correlation for CO2 reduction is nuclear + hydro (exactly what France is doing). Comparing the contribution of REs (without hydro) & nuclear energy alone gives you a much clearer picture - nuclear is much more strongly correlated. If you take the one outlier for REs out of the picture (Finland) the situation gets much worse, with RE cor
France has a big issue to face in the coming decade or two, which is replacement of the nuclear fleet as their reactors will be 40-50 yrs old by 2025.
Sure, but really all it takes is political will and investment in Areva's EPR.
And there's also the as-yet unresolved problem of a longterm dump site unless Bure has been definitively chosen.
That's not exactly a huge problem. This is again political in getting the NIMBY's and enviro-crazies who are going to scream bloody murder out of the way. An alternative would be for the French to get off their butts again and restart fast-reactor designs to burn the waste up (doesn't have to be a Superphenix-type reactor, but probably something more like IFR).
Other issues include the use of some nukes in load-following mode and heavy reliance on electric heating, which contributes to their overall low CO2 emissions from electricity generation.
All good modern designs are *better* at load-following, not worse. I don't see a technical problem here. Also, presumably we'd want them to rely on electric heating, as that allows them to offset household heating CO2 emissions into a zero-CO2 power source. Renewables aren't going to be much different here (things such as wood chips and similar are simply not enough to take the whole home heating push alone). The logic is quite simple: if you've got plenty of zero-CO2 electricity, move as many people to electricity for everything they need as you can. One extra bit that might be a significant benefit is nuclear co-generation for home heating, which wind & solar simply can't do.
Slashdot Mirror
Turn a factory on full power when the wind is blowing and slow it down when the wind isn't.
What in the hell are you on about? Is a car factory supposed to slow down or stop dead for a few days every month simply because the wind isn't blowing? What's that going to do to their materials supply and product shipments? And what about the lost production time and wages that have just been blown into the wind, quite literally? I've heard lots of arguments about intermittency from outright denial that there's a problem to handwaving and hypothesizing about non-existent technology to address it, but suggesting that industry just stop due to bad weather, well, that just takes the cake.
The wind is always blowing somewhere
No, it isn't. When are you going to stop denying data and start acknowledging there's a problem?
not to mention that the earth's core is always hot
Then if geothermal is sufficient by itself for several days (see graphs above), why build wind & solar in the first place?
gravity never stops working
Gravitational potential energy cannot be used as an energy source.
Clearly if you build enough renewable energy it can meet any imaginable demand
And quite clearly, if you cared to look at actual grid data, you'd see that it can't, at least not from intermittent sources.
Pumping water reservoirs is done all over Europe, without flooding vast areas, as it simply uses already existing glacial areas that were created by similar processes to begin with.
Except there are nowhere near enough of those natural reservoirs available for any appreciable amount of large-scale storage, hence why there are projects like Jachenau, Osser and Atdorf. All of these installations are constructed by excavation of a large volume of elevated mountain terrain, reinforcing it with concrete and leak-tight materials to prevent natural embankment weathering and/or catastrophic dam failure and flooding them.
Newer designs actually promise a lot more, given the ever advancing march if science.
No advancements in engineering and materials science can ever hope to circumvent the laws of physics. Flywheels are simply an extremely shitty way of storing vast amounts of energy long-term. For frequency regulation, okay. But for storing TWh's worth of energy, it's insanely expensive. This is the Beacon Power (who went bankrupt, btw) Stephentown flywheel energy storage and frequency regulation plant that can store all of 5 MWh worth of energy (about 1 large wind turbine for 1 hour). Meanwhile, in reality, in order to be able to smooth out solar production, you'd need at least 3-4 day's worth of nearly the whole freakin' grid's power. Just to store one 1GW nuclear reactor's equivalent production for one day you'd need about 5000 of such flywheel storage plants.
These are not made up figures. Here I've taken actual whole-German power production figures from Dec 2013 and blown them up 5x simulating a buildout of their current ~35 GW of wind & ~30 GW of solar installed capacity to insanely high levels (to a total of 325 GW of nameplate installed capacity - actual current total nameplate installed capacity in Germany is ~180 GW) and analyzed the shortfall. It'd still require ~550x the largest pumped hydro storage plant that exists in Germany (Goldisthal, which cost a cool 600 mil Euros, so just multiply to get a feel for the capital cost on top of the 5x wind & solar buildout). I didn't even need to be very picky about the month, as the same situation repeated itself on the very next month of Jan 2014. Now imagine you wanted to meet just 10% of this storage requirement using flywheels - that'd be on the order of 466 GWh, or about 100000 of the Stephentown flywheel energy storage plants, taking up ~1000km^2 just for the freakin' plants.
So energy storage seems a dynamite idea, but it's only when you start to run the numbers that you begin to realize the scale of the problem involved and how laughable some of the proposed solutions are.
As for the shuttle, to split hairs, I never specified it stored the flywheel energy for electrical purposes. Reaction mass is energy, too. But I yield to your point, that I should have been more specific. The main point was, that it can store energy for weeks without significant losses, anyway.
You're not splitting hairs, you're just covering your ass for being dead wrong. At no point did the shuttle use flywheels for any kind of energy storage or energy source. Just admit that you were wrong and move on.
Even Liquid salt reservoirs with just 6h of time are already enough to cover a night during the shorter nights of the year.
Have a look at the graphs of power production graphs I posted above again. I didn't make these up, they're actual production figures. Then understand that 6h doesn't even begin approach the
Pumping water to higher locations
This is actually the most economical and it's still unbelievably expensive, not to speak of the impact on nature (large-scale flooding of previously unflooded areas) and unavailability in most places in sufficient quantities.
Splitting hydrogen and oxygen from water
This is already being exploited in a much more sensible process where we produce natural gas from the hydrogen and some CO2 sources. The process is expensive, has low efficiency (~25%) and requires that you still maintain a fleet of natural gas plants equivalent to almost all of your daily needs. Pumped hydro is actually cheaper. Also, imperfect piping and methane leaks can lead to quite substantial GHG emissions.
Spinning up large-mass, high-velocity, low-drag flywheels
None of these systems are meant for long-term storage. They're used to smooth out a fluctuating power supply on a second-by-second basis.
(it's how the venerable Shuttle stored energy for its week long missions)
No, the Shuttle used hydrogen fuel cells. You're confusing it with reaction wheels, which are used for maintaing attitude control.
Storing the energy in the electrical network itself
The electrical grid doesn't work that way. Yes, the grid has a bunch of electrical inertia, but nowhere near the amount needed to provide backup for any sensibly usable amount of time (hence why rotating masses are used for smoothing).
Heating liquid salt reservoirs
At present these top out at around 6h of run time, so about 1-2 orders of magnitude lower than what's needed. Also, they are mightily expensive. Add 72 hours of salt storage to your friendly solar plant and you'll see its cost fly through the roof.
The question is: WHEN do we get off our collectives asses, are ready to pay a bit more for power for 10-20 years and then get rid of the problem entirely
The answer is: never. For every 1 rich person you see on the planet, who can afford to overpay for energy, there's 5-6 people who can't. They too want electricity. And guess what they'll do to get it.
In IFR the cladding is loose-fitting, so the spent fuel is extracted from that. Since it isn't oxidized but is instead in pure metallic form, no oxide reduction step by way of an acid bath is necessary. The fuel pellets are simply melted and gaseous fission products are driven off. Next the molten mass is placed in a molten salt bath and an electroplating process extracts uranium and plutonium in metallic form onto an electrode (along with a little bit of fission products - this is serves as radiation shielding, preventing theft). These are then extracted and recast into new metallic fuel rods in an injection casting step. Finally, the new fuel rods are reinserted into cladding tubes, filled with sodium and welded shut. The fission products are then vitrified in glass and sealed in dry casks for storage. What's interesting in relation to thorium reprocessing is that this isn't a theoretical process. It's been demonstrated 20 years ago and we know how to do all of the detailed steps around it. Sure you can always find improvements (like switching from a borosilicate glass to an iron phosphate glass), but the technology is ready for commercial deployment. For more details, see the ANL article on pyroprocessing. Thorium has its place for sure, but in terms of technology that's ready to deploy today, fast breeders are that technology.
As for further developments on fast reactor technology, TerraPower's reactor is a really neat approach to fast breeders, because it avoids the reprocessing step entirely, instead doing it by being really smart about their cladding design and reshuffling their fuel geometry continuously to keep the neutron economy optimal.
I would agree that the regulatory environment in the west is hell-bent on killing any and all new projects, but you really can't blame them for being super-duper careful, as they have a hysterical public to deal with who perceive any failure, however small, as a catastrophe, thanks in large part due to media hype and fear mongering by news outlets and environmental groups. In Russia and China, meanwhile, the public realize that realistically it's either nuclear, with its occasional potential radiation release when it goes wrong (which can kill people, no doubt about it) vs. coal and natural gas, which kill people even when operating right and make places like Beijing look like freakin' Silent Hill.
As for IFR, no, the fuel isn't molten in the core, they're still solid fuel rods. The important difference for IFR fuel is that it's a pure metal, not an oxide, so its heat conductivity is much higher, which in turn allows higher temperature operation without stressing the material so much (as internal temperatures are far lower than the 1000C gradient experienced in oxide fuels). From this design decision, tons of other important features are derived, like the very strong negative temperature reactivity coefficient, the passive heat removal, ease of reprocessing (no more acid processes), etc. It's really quite an elegant design and it's ready to roll today.
And the spurious crap like [...] wind power is too intermittent
Indeed, who could ever present such slanderous accusations? Oh wait, how about actual grid measurements? (Aggregate German whole-grid performance numbers from Dec 2013 broken down by source.)
You made the very basic error of comparing nameplate capacity. You also need to consider capacity factor, which for solar in UK latitudes is around 0.1 - 0.15, whereas the EPRs that they plan to construct here are 0.9. So taking that into account, your 13 GW utility scale solar suddenly shrinks to <2 GW, whereas the nuclear plant is still around 3 GW. So before we even get to dispatchability of the power source and seasonal loading, solar loses by about 1/3 to the most wildly overpriced nuclear power plant I've ever seen in my life. Next you need to consider that the nuclear plant is planned to operate for 60 years, whereas the solar plant is most likely going to need replacement after 30 or at most 40 years. Finally, the $27B cost of the plant seems to me to be wildly out of whack with what these very same reactors cost in places like China (cheaper by about a factor of 4x). Meanwhile Russia is also building modern VVER-1200s at an equivalent cost of 4x cheaper than the plant in the UK. Make of this what you will, but it appears to me that the western world is losing its industrial prowess and losing it fast.
EDF say 20-25 years but then go on to say that the wind turbines built 30 years ago are still going strong.
Wind turbine life depends on how many hours of runtime they get - this strongly depends on the local conditions. A modern turbine is designed to run for ~120000 hours. Divide by 8760 hours in a year and you get about 14 years. Obviously, it's not always windy to run it, so you get more. It's basically a function of the capacity factor and the environment. An offshore unit has to deal with a lot more wear and tear since it runs more often, is in harsher sea conditions, and is in a high-moisture salty environment (not to speak of a large part of it being permanently submerged). As for the turbine running for 30 years, it's a 30 kW unit, like this one - hardly a big accomplishment. You know the average maintenance run on these things is 30 days, right? Do you think you could keep a car running for 30 years if you service it every 30 days? Also google for gearbox reliability of wind turbines - it's a big thing with them as the larger units start to accrue some age.
In any case, age isn't really such a big problem for machinery that's properly maintained. Reactors originally designed for 30 year run times are expected to be able to go up to 60 and possibly more. Modern reactors have been outright designed for a 60 year lifetime and might last a lot longer, but it cannot be relied upon when doing an analysis, which is why I take the manufacturers at their words (Westinghouse AP1000 is rated for 60 years and most wind turbines for 20-25 years, as you say).
Like the Brookings Study you seem to ignore the large amount of energy that mining, transporting and processing the nuclear fuel requires.
I didn't, I used the reference you posted (remember: "According to Sovacool's analysis" is what you wrote), which listed nuclear as 66 gCO2e/kWh over its whole lifecycle and wind as 10 gCO2e/kWh. I then proceeded to show how, using their own numbers for the construction carbon footprint of nuclear, wind was flatly underestimated. Nuclear's 66 gCO2e/kWh footprint is supposed to be 12% construction, or ~8 gCO2e/kWh, yet a wind plant of equivalent production capacity would need around 10x as much in construction materials, so saying wind is 10 gCO2e/kWh in total is a little dishonest to say the least. Don't complain when you use bad references.
Humans have shown themselves to utterly incapable of handling nuclear power without making a mess of it.
Have a little faith in the human species. Objectivelly, we've actually had a pretty good half century with it, especially if you compare our track record with coal which kills in a week about as many as nuclear has killed in all of its 60 year history, considering the best scientific evidence we have for the excess casualties that will be caused by Chernobyl and Fukushima fallouts (~4500 excess deaths) - I do hope you're not one of the conspiracy nuts who thinks the UN, WHO and UNSCEAR are all in cahoots with the nuclear industry, the Soviet authorities and probably the Illuminati or whatever. The reason why the general public is still mostly neutral to coal and natural gas and frowns on nuclear is because coal & gas only ever kill a few people at a time, which is highly politically preferable, plus nuclear has this enigma factor, which the media love to hype for fear (fear sells news). If you don't believe me, ask yourself whether people are more rational to be afraid of flying in planes instead of driving cars.
Sooner or later renewables will be the only option, we might as well start big with it now whilst we still have alternatives as a temporary backup.
And what will we be backing them up with when they reach, say, 5x their current built-out in high-RE countries like Germany? I've actually run the numbers and there isn
They calculated that construction accounted for 12% of the 66 figure, so about 8 gCO2/kWh. They quote a 1GWe PWR as requiring "170,000 ton of concrete, 32,000 ton of steel, 1363 ton of copper, and a total of 205,464ton of other materials". So let's play around with that figure a bit. At a cap factor of 0.8 (fairly average for nuclear. I know they quoted 0.66, but that's comparing nuclear from 30 years ago to renewables today, which is dishonest), that's 800 MW 24x7 for the PWR. How many wind turbines would that need to provide? Well, even assuming a very neat cap factor of 0.35 for wind (almost unobtainable on land), we'll need 326 of these babies (I'm using a 7.5MW turbine instead of 1.5MW because that's what I have materials data on - this is, if anything, favorable for wind, as materials overhead per MW is smaller with larger turbines), which aggregated together, would mass almost 1.6 million tons of concrete, 105 thousand tons of steel and other metals for the machine housings and generators and ~110 thousand tons of GRP fiberglass epoxy resin for the blades (and guess where those plastics come from). This is multiple times more material than is needed for the nuclear plant and considering wind turbines are designed to last ~20 years not the 40-60 years as nuclear plants are, the impact would be much more dramatic, yet the paper lists onshore wind as 10 gCOe/kWh with a straight face. On construction alone an equivalent wind farm would probably exceed nuclear over all of its lifecycle, even using their own figures.
According to Sovacool's analysis, nuclear power, at 66 gCO2e/kWh emissions
Experiment trumps theory.
Seems China does a much better job. Both Sanmen 1 and Haiyang 1 (both AP1000s) are expected to come online this year, on budget and on schedule. Taishan 1 and Taishan 2 (Areva EPRs) are also reported on schedule for startup this/next year (depending on how well their testing is gonna go). The EPRs are an especially impressive accomplishment, since those are the most powerful reactors ever built (1650 MWe). This seems to support OP's assertion that if you go into the project determined for success, push hard and don't let NIMBYs distract you, things can happen as planned. Seriously, if you want to see the state of the art in nuclear, look at China, they are moving fast. My guess is they're wanna accumulate as much experience running those reactors as possible and going forward standardize on a winner and pump them out like crazy to reduce their air pollution and GHG emissions. They're also running a few modern Russian VVER-1000s, which the IAEA referred to as the world's "safest" (I guess this remains to be seen, but from a technology perspective I gotta admit, they've done an excellent job).
Wow, your response to me showing that your source wasn't peer-reviewed is "bah, peer-review is worthless anyway, slashdot proves it!" At least you're honest in your science denial. You also conveniently forgot that I actually posted a few links that do more than just accuse the authors of not submitting to peer-review, but instead point out their use of unreliable sources, unproven or disproven dose-response models and excessive extrapolation, all of which will earn you a royal F- and the following loss of credibility in any academic setting. I also showed you how Sherman, the book's translator and promoter, data mined monthly CDC mortality data to draw a completely bogus conclusion, which fails even basic attempts at checking against the original data source and clearly shows the researchers' deliberate data manipulation.
But hey, once you're into science denial, hearsay obviously trumps mountains of carefully examined epidemiological data. I hope you're proud sitting next to your creationist, global warming-denying, geocentrist, flat-earther peers.
What has 'peer reviewed' to do with that?
Publications without peer-review cannot be trusted to have been critically scrutinized by experts in the field.
The amount of dead in Chernobyl we never will know as late deathes can not objectively accounted to it.
So you're saying that we might as well guess at it? Actual research has been and is being conducted into this. What you're proposing isn't science, it's religion.
Just ask one living there?
As I said, at best it would demonstrate that misinformed people are giving other people misinformation. If you had asked around in the 15th century, you could have gotten people to wholeheartedly and with utter conviction attest to having seen witchcraft, but that doesn't mean witchcraft is real.
They certainly support your 'believes'.
You talk about hearsay and poorly researched pseudoscience. I meanwhile give you links to actual peer-reviewed research papers, real data and direct evidence. And I'm the one who has "beliefs"? I'm not writing this to insult you, but you seem awfully like one of the "feelies" who will deny science if it contradicts their feelings on a subject, be it climate change or GMOs or nuclear power for that matter.
perhaps i should have been clearer on my use of that article as reference. i have not (and have no real interest) in compiling all the data sources i have learned from which create the mosaic.
Translation: I have no evidence.
the truth, as it usually is - is blatantly obvious.
Translation: don't think about it, use intuition.
i listed it after a 5 second google search to at least turn any open-minded readers onto the possiblity of additional information.
Interestingly, your response, which probably took longer than 5 seconds to compose, didn't include any of that copious information.
as far as ridiculing something, well, you seem more interested in attacking the source rather than content
I did ready through your links. One was a reader comment by an accountant formerly working at GE and another was an opinion piece which only most hypothetically mentioned Fukushima in a single sentence.
i do however, encourage anyone who sees an uncanny coincidence in the timing of the action
You mean like they waited for over 3 years since the accident and changed governing parties once during that time before choosing to push it through? Seriously, at this point I'd be more suspicious of the US' influence here, since it's the US that heavily lobbied for this law and they're the ones who love cracking down on whistleblowers (plus the Japanese government is best buds with them).
I'm not arguing that this law is good, I think it's an appalling law. All I was doing is ridiculing the OP for linking a law with the Fukushima disaster simply because it's from the same country with no evidence to back it up (OP's link only presented the law with no evidence that it's intended use is for Fukushima and your links were just speculation submitted to the paper by a reader and an opinion piece). And you know what they say of arguments presented without evidence. The debate around the disaster needs to be a lot more rational and a lot less alarmist and conspiratorial. Trouble is, fear sells papers, so I don't see an end in sight.
Seriously, you're citing opinion pieces (in the latter link) and COMMUNITY COMMENTS (in the former link) as evidence that this is purpose of the law? Can I also cite any old Internet yokel's comments as long as they appear on the domain of a news site?
Getting the computations right tells us to phase out nuclear power as too expensive
Sure, it's just that stupid reality that keeps fucking up Amory's love story.
I have to agree with Bill Gates here again, in that modern computer modeling is a night and day difference between then and now. Back when the THTR-300 was designed (construction started in 1971, so design was done in the mid 60s), this(*) was the state of the art in supercomputers and this was still the most common way of solving mathematical problems and so people could not help but make bad decisions that had to be tested and failed experimentally. Nowadays we can digitally simulate to extreme minutiae the conditions that designers back then could only guess at. Today the uncertainty in reactor design isn't in the thermodynamics part anymore - we've got that down pretty well by now - it's in the materials science and how materials respond over time to various environments, i.e. our simulation granule has shrunk considerably from being whole subsystems of the plant to almost the molecular level. To claim that nuclear designs can't work because there were mistakes made 40 years ago is the same as to say that hydrogen fuel cells can't work, because look at what happened to Apollo-13.
(*) "With performance of about 1 megaFLOPS, the CDC 6600 was the world's fastest computer from 1964 to 1969,"
Since 'the incident' the police is knocking on doors of young couples living in the Fukushima area and in the fall out zones north east of it, telling the couples: " you know, you should consider to have no children" (Or move away to the far south or Hokkaido)
Can you actually show this, or is this just the latest of the tall tales making its rounds on the anti-nuclear blogosphere? And anyway, even if it did happen in some form, all it would show is that people are afraid and giving each other potentially poor advice. It doesn't show that they're at actual substantial risk of harm, otherwise you could go around telling everybody to stay indoors to prevent them from being run over by cars (you know, this we can actually show to happen).
In Chernobyl the death toll over all is estimated to be a million, roughly. /. posters claim it was 3 or 5 ...
Ugh, not that rag again. Yablokov's publication is a book, not a peer-reviewed scientific paper. It contains tons of errors and was translated and pushed onto the New York Academy of Sciences by known anti-nuclear crazies who aren't above outright falsehoods (like their assertions that Fukushima killed 15000 people in US in the initial 14 weeks after the accident, even though their data is trivially shown to have been manipulated and utterly bogus; Mangano is often seen publishing together with another crazie, Sherman, and they've even been torn a new one by an avid linear-no-threshold-supporting researcher). The Yablokov publication has since been criticized by the NYAS and they've distanced themselves from it. The short story is that the NYAS' reputation was co-opted as a vehicle to fluff up the credibility of an utterly bogus piece of non-scientific writing by anti-nuclear activists.
I witnessed 1986 about a few ten thousand ... it was news every day on TV. I really wonder how people in our days with straight face claim only a few people died.
Oh my, so if something's on TV, it is truth! Well fire the scientists then, obviously all we need to do to determine fact from fiction is to listen to the daily news cycle. Fox News will be pleased.
Luckily the initial disaster in Fukushima was far away from this. However the long term issues we only will know in 30 years ... plus.
Even assuming the fairly uncontended (mainly in anti-nuke cycles) linear-no-threshold dose response model, according to actual peer-reviewed studies, on average we'd expect ~250 excess deaths over the years with an upper bound of ~2500 (and that's assuming no evacuations). Was the accident harmless? Certainly not. Should TEPCO be made to compensate people for their troubles? Absolutely! But this fear mongering using junk science is in no way different to global-warming deniers and 9/11 truthers simply ignoring scientific facts to meet their political agendas. Do be like them.
law in japan effectively gags anyone from talking about fukushima in an honest way
Wow, that's some beautiful mental gymnastics there, going from a law intended to protect government/military secrets and lobbied for heavily by the US and linking that to Fukushima. Don't forget to stop by the booth and pick up your tinfoil medal.
Corrosion.
This has been essentially resolved very early on:
An out-of-pile corrosion test program was carried out for Hastelloy-N which indicated extremely low corrosion rates at MSRE conditions. Capsules exposed in the Materials Testing Reactor showed that salt fission power densities of more than 200 W/cm3 had no adverse effects on compatibility of fuel salt, Hastelloy-N, and graphite. Fluorine gas was found to be produced by radiolysis of frozen salts, but only at temperatures below about 100 C.
Operating it will also be a nightmare. Can you put a diver into molton salt to fix things?
What the? Why would you go for a dive in a super-heated radioactive salt at above 500 C? Below ~400C the salt solidifies, so no, you can't go dive in it any more than you can go for a dive in a salt mine. Moreover, I think you misunderstand the design of the core region of most molten salt reactors. They aren't great big tanks which you can move around in. Most are designed as a series of narrow tubes which the salt is pumped through, lined by moderator (typically graphite), all surrounded by a neutron reflector (usually heavy steel). Molten salt reactors are projected to be cheaper precisely because they don't require super-large forged pressure vessels. Regardless, even fairly large (in terms of capacity) PWR pressure vessels aren't really that big that you'd send a diver into it, even assuming anybody ever did that (fuel is loaded by crane from the top while the pressure vessel is open and completely submerged in water).
"expected effect: increased fossil fuel emissions due to sporadic running". Not sure what this is supposed to mean.
There are many problems with running thermal power plants, especially those with large boilers, sporadically, because they have lots of thermal inertia. For example, a lignite power plant has a minimum output level of ~30% - that's just a limitation of the thermodynamics of the system. If at a given point there's too much renewable capacity on the grid, the plant operator is forced to shut down completely. If, however, at some later point, say 6-8 hours later, renewables lapse again, the coal plant operator is told to perform a restart, but with a large coal plant it's not that simple to just load in new coal and throw in a match. They need to reheat the furnace, because otherwise the coal just won't burn. To reheat say a 600 MW lignite plant takes ~100000 liters of fuel oil - that's vaporized and blown into the furnace and burned and only after that the first coal can start to come in. All of the created CO2 and extra cost for the plant operator goes up the smoke stack and hasn't produced a single kWh. This is true, though to a lesser degree, for CCGT as well - large thermal inertia of the boiler and reheat system that is lost every time it's shut down and restart. The only guys who don't suffer from this significantly is OCGT, but they have terrible CO2 emissions per kWh compared to CCGT.
That Germany did not improve its CO2 emission despite a massive investment in renewables is primarly because they decided shut down nuclear power first rather than coal. A reduction is expected for the future when renewables start to replace fossil instead of nuclear.
If you have a look at the CO2/kWh graph I sent you, you'll notice that the reduction trend line starts in 1990 and the renewable buildout somewhere around 1999 and it hasn't really had much of an effect on the figure. In fact, when I do a linear fit on the first derivative of the CO2/kWh data, it appears as though the reduction trend will be slowing down an
My point is that France's electricity is cheap because the government pays so it cannot be used as argument why nuclear is cheap did.
Care to demonstrate this? Also, Germany's renewable sector is also heavily subsidized, so even if I accepted that France's electrical production (not R&D - that's a whole different story) is subsidized, you could at best say that both countries do production subsidies. Even then the French are getting the better end of the deal with lower rates.
An LFTR is an *engineering* nightmare.
I presume you've worked on LFTR engineering then? Can you name some of the engineering nightmarish points?
while renewables are already competitive and getting cheaper every year.
Oh really? Without a guaranteed feed-in tariff and market distortion by forcing the grid operator to take renewables first and make the rest of the traditional generators pay for their intermittency? I had a look at a fairly large project in Germany, Solarpark Meuro and it is quoted at 140 million Euros for the first 70 MW installed. Naively you'd recalculate that to be 2000 Euros per kW, compare to nuclear (which costs more per kWh) and declare victory. Except that's not an honest comparison. Nameplate capacity on a solar plant is not the same as on a nuclear plant due to capacity factor. Solar in Germany has CF ~0.15, whereas nuclear is >0.9, often even 0.95. So to replace one nuke plant kW of capacity you'd need to install ~6x that amount in solar, so it's no longer 2000 Euros per kW, it's more like 12000 Euros per kW. But the story doesn't end there. Solar isn't dispatchable, so you need to add the cost of backup storage into that. And when it's winter and your solar insolation drops by a factor of 5-6x, your solar system is again effectively completely useless and you need yet another plant to produce (so potentially yet another X-amounts of kW to backup your solar array). And then when these things are diffuse and in different locations (solar good in the south, wind good in the north and presumably storage somewhere in the middle) you'll need transmission capacity. etc. etc.
These dishonest price per MW of installed nameplate capacity comparisons really bug me, because those making them don't understand that they're making a dishonest comparison.
Economically, investing in nuclear is a poor decision.
So just for kicks I've taken data from IEA's CO2 Highlights 2013 catalog (+one real-time data point for 2013 from RTE) for France and plotted them against data from Germany's Umweltsbundesamt and this is what you get. Notice how the renewable share (and that includes hydro) gets larger faster than CO2 per kWh decreases? In recent years, in fact, it has jumped up, because the German grid is experiencing an expected effect: increased fossil fuel emissions due to sporadic running. Even if we extrapolate out to 2056 you'll see that German CO2/kWh is still ~2.5x higher than present-day French emissions (and the French are working on lowering those even further - this year they've announced they managed to halve it by running fossil plants less & running nuclear and hydro plants more).
The second graph is taking data from co2benchmark.com for all European countries for the year 2008 and plotting their CO2/kWh emissions versus various energy sources and their compositions. If you have a look at the R^2 factor you'll notice that the strongest correlation for CO2 reduction is nuclear + hydro (exactly what France is doing). Comparing the contribution of REs (without hydro) & nuclear energy alone gives you a much clearer picture - nuclear is much more strongly correlated. If you take the one outlier for REs out of the picture (Finland) the situation gets much worse, with RE cor
France has a big issue to face in the coming decade or two, which is replacement of the nuclear fleet as their reactors will be 40-50 yrs old by 2025.
Sure, but really all it takes is political will and investment in Areva's EPR.
And there's also the as-yet unresolved problem of a longterm dump site unless Bure has been definitively chosen.
That's not exactly a huge problem. This is again political in getting the NIMBY's and enviro-crazies who are going to scream bloody murder out of the way. An alternative would be for the French to get off their butts again and restart fast-reactor designs to burn the waste up (doesn't have to be a Superphenix-type reactor, but probably something more like IFR).
Other issues include the use of some nukes in load-following mode and heavy reliance on electric heating, which contributes to their overall low CO2 emissions from electricity generation.
All good modern designs are *better* at load-following, not worse. I don't see a technical problem here. Also, presumably we'd want them to rely on electric heating, as that allows them to offset household heating CO2 emissions into a zero-CO2 power source. Renewables aren't going to be much different here (things such as wood chips and similar are simply not enough to take the whole home heating push alone). The logic is quite simple: if you've got plenty of zero-CO2 electricity, move as many people to electricity for everything they need as you can. One extra bit that might be a significant benefit is nuclear co-generation for home heating, which wind & solar simply can't do.
So that data source is out of date. Do you have more up-to-date data?