You forgot to congratulate China on their perfect record of nuclear safety. After all, there's no evidence to the contrary, right?:-D
Lack of evidence warrants neither congratulations nor badmouthing, I simply reserve judgement.
And any speculation by Western running dogs who dare to cast aspersions on the glorious People's Republic can be summarily dismissed, of course.
What's with the spiteful tone? They simply run their country differently, in a top-down approach. It has its problems but also its efficiencies. I'm not saying I'm a fan of all they do, I do take significant issue with their military expansionism, but I'm not going to bash somebody automatically for everything simply because of who they are.
Also don't take everything from Wikileaks, especially stuff found in US cables as Gospel. Even the article mentions that the fears could have been overblown due to the US' self-interest in promoting its own industry front-runner, Westinghouse's AP-1000 (of which the Chinese are also building several and the first one coming online this year). That is not to say that passively safe plants aren't better than older ones requiring engineered safety systems - of course they are. What I'm saying is that the Chinese take a pragmatic wide-swath approach, building everything they can get their hands on, accrue actual operational experience, after which they'll pick one winner and they'll start pumping them out like hot cakes (they always get full construction IP and licensing of their own variants of the foreign tech so that they can start building them themselves).
While I'm an LFTR project supporter, I'd view it backwards, i.e. LFTR/MSR as a bridging technology until wind, solar & storage pan out. I will be the first to agree that nuclear technology has its dangers, though in the current overall picture, they are relatively benign. Still, one would have to be an idiot not to support an inexhaustible power source with little to no direct health impact - once REs sort their problems, I'll wholeheartedly endorse them.
Propose a country of comparison. Looking at the CO2 vs MWh charts the only ones with comparably low or lower emissions from the electrical sector are Norway, Switzerland, Lithuania and Sweden. In each case these low emissions are a combination of two factors: abundant hydro resources enabled by specific geography (up to 98% in the case of Norway) and a heavy reliance on nuclear to cover the rest. Here's the breakdown for these countries:
Norway: 98% hydro
Switzerland: 57% hydro, 40% nuclear
Lithuania: 76% nuclear
Sweden: 47% hydro, 45% nuclear
Each of these cases is somewhat special in its own right. Sweden and Norway have low population density 15-20 people/km^2 and favorable geographical conditions with good hydro resources. Still, in 3 out of 4 cases nuclear was needed to help the effort.
Again, don't paint with a broad brush. I know they're not saints, I said that, but that doesn't mean everything they do is inherently insidious or suspect. I gave you a hypothesis that is perfectly innocent and plausible given the facts we know. Indeed, I've even shown how the known facts are incompatible with some waste dumping hypothesis. That doesn't mean it's impossible, just less likely. In absence of facts I reserve judgement. If you can find more info on this, I'd be grateful.
What makes you think I'm not an engineer myself? Also nice appeal to authority.
I knew most of this stuff before Google existed.
Then why not provide evidence to rebut my claims? Out of hand dismissal of mountains of evidence to your contrary and continued proclamation of victory while spouting insults, well, that just reflects much worse on you than it does on me.
Ever thought about wind turbines are easy to take offline and thermal is not?
I assume you mean taking offline excess capacity when its not needed. Sure taking a wind turbine offline when it's not needed is easy enough, but this significantly lowers the capacity factor of these devices, increases LCOE and prolongs ROI.
You are still not answering about that 60GW
I honestly can't explain it any more simply than that. Look, it really boils down to these questions: if you build enough wind to cover 80% of peak demand, what happens during the days when REs produce 1/10 of their nominal capacity (as does happen - if you don't believe the tons of sources I've provided for this, then you're just a fact denier). Do you build so much capacity that your minimum values are above peak demand (and waste tons of it by not using it when its available)? Or do you build transmission infrastructure capable of carrying 80% of peak demand in from elsewhere (which does not currently exist)? Or do you build shitloads of energy storage (which is expensive as heck)? Or do you build additional traditional backup peaker capacity, which effectively doubles your system cost (before we get to transmission and switching issues)? You have to do one of those. Answering "none of the above" without providing an alternative is not an answer.
instead of lies from "no wind" little shits like you
Keep the hate coming, I love confirmation that you don't have any arguments to respond with.
80% of 80 GW is about 60 GW (I stress the word "about" here - these are ballpark figures).
As such there will be days when Germany hits peak or close to peak demand with essentially the bulk of the REE resources being unavailable, hence the 60 GW figure.
Your proposal was to import this shortfall from other places where the wind blows, as it always blows somewhere (I didn't dispute that). However, this carries several problems: (1) there's no such large-capacity transmission infrastructure and any expansion projects are being heavily opposed by land owners, (2) this requires installing surplus capacity at remote locations, (3) dealing with the transport losses and complex line control (oversized lines introduce severe problems with lots of reactive power, etc, and finally (4) being willing to absorb the political risks of having the power come from out of the land on really short terms.
You might counter that a portion of that energy can come from hydro & biomass. Hydro is unfortunately already nearly maxed out (*) and biomass has problems with cost and repurposing of lots of farm land for energy crop production (and questionable CO2 benefits due to the excessive use of industrially produced fertilizers and use of heavy agricultural machinery running on fossil fuels; though there is room for improvement here, so no biggie). Still, this requires installing extra capacity, which must be counted against the cost of RE sources of energy. The alternative is to install energy storage on a massive scale to smooth out the intermittent sources and deliver power when needed - not an easy proposition either.
(*) Source: "23% of total technically feasible hydropower potential is exploited in China, 82% in USA, 65% in Canada, 73% in Germany"
I'm gonna respond to your only verifiable claim, as the rest is of no interest to me:
No wind anywhere? What crap! Why should I remain silent when someone is pushing that line to try to bully someone else?
Is citing facts bullying? Read the graph. 32 GW nameplate installed capacity. Overall production average on 04/06/2013 + 04/07/2013 less than 1/20 of that, dropping to 1 GW for a few hours around noon 02/06/2013 and to almost zero around noon 04/25/2013).
If you are not being serious then you are either far more stupid than is likely or dishonest. I hate how this place is now infested with "end justifies the means" little shits like you.
Name calling is usually the last resort of a man with no evidence or facts to back his claims. I generally do not enjoy gloating, but you sure do make it hard for me not to feel good about my positions.
Obviously you need enough capacity to ensure a certain baseline
How about 30x the load (nameplate installed ~30 GW, 99% guaranteed ~0.9 GW; that's over the whole country). With Germany's ~70 GW average consumption you'll need to install ~2100 GW of nameplate power (or about half of the world's current installed power capacity). Assuming 10 MW wind turbines (which have around 200m rotor diameters) you'll need ~210000 turbines. As a general rule of thumb, wind turbine spacing suggests 6-10 rotor diameters, so taking 8 as the neat central value, each such turbine requires ~2 square km of space around it. 210000 turbines times 2 square km is about 50000 square km more than the entire area of Germany (most of which isn't particularly rich in wind resources anyways), so clearly something needs to be done about lowering this requirement. You'll need storage. And that's expensive and frequently also area-intensive.
There are no simple solutions and there's a decent chance they won't ever materialize. That is not to say that they can't. Obviously if they do come around, so much the better. However, at present storing energy at grid-scale is extremely hard and most lay people deeply underestimate how hard and costly it's going to be to resolve.
There's a difference between saying something is oversimplified to bordering on untruth and calling somebody "possibly as stupid" (and the "you cannot be" at the front is just some passive-aggresive BS pretend game) and "pretended stupidity", implying I'm not being serious. I didn't call them liars - that would imply that I think they know they are telling untruths. They might just as well be misinformed, overly optimistic and/or just plain wrong (which is what I actually think they and you are). Throughout the rest of my posts my tone was always reserved and measured. It was you who escalated it. If your intention is to start name calling, go troll some other person. I'm interested in hard data and demonstrable facts, not assertions and mud flinging.
Your reading comprehension needs some work. I said "With larger installations on a country the scale of Germany what will change is only the absolute values, but the relative proportions of them are going to stay mostly the same" and that "Germany requires 50-80 GW of constant production a day." Obviously if 80% of the 80 GW were to come from renewables, about 60 GW is going to be required and due to observed 30:1 shortfalls in production, effectively 60 GW worth of spare capacity will be required. You see, you need to first understand the context of the numbers I give you and then start critiquing them. You can't just point at two sentences and laugh because the numbers in them are different. I'm not going to explain things to you as if to a 12 year-old.
WTF is it with you armchair "one true energy" zealots?
I'm not saying all can be done with one source. I explicitly acknowledged that 15% of France's load is hydro and I'm well aware that well over 90% of Norway's is - clearly for Norway nuclear makes little sense, since they have plenty of resource and very sparse population. I'm comparing apples to apples, France and Germany (and partly Denmark).
since I was working in the electricity generating industry
I kinda doubt that, as you seem not to have any grasp of the size of the problems posed by integrating intermittent sources at any meaningful percentages, but it's possible you've got a rosy view, since by your own admission, you haven't worked in power generation for a decade (when RE proportions were much lower in the discussed countries).
What's with the name calling and vitriol? Usually I see people reacting this way when they hold and defend beliefs that are based on faith rather than hard data.
In any case, you should re-read what I wrote: "given that most of Germany's wind power is installed near the norther sea shore and Denmark & Poland are there too". A localized loss of wind is going to affect a majority of production in both Germany and Denmark. We've mapped wind resources out very accurately, you know.
Do you really think Germany was down 60GW of wind power at any one instant?
This is a graph of actual wind production figures in Germany at daily resolution for 2011. Even if you don't speak German, the three yellow lines in there represent: nameplate installed capacity (29.06 GW), average power (5.145 GW) and minimal power delivery at 99% confidence (0.918 GW), all at 1 day resolutions (the problems get much worse at finer resolutions). I'd call 1/30th of the install nameplate capacity pretty much zero. With larger installations on a country the scale of Germany (not a small country by any account) what will change is only the absolute values, but the relative proportions of them are going to stay mostly the same. Even if you take the average into account the average production as your goal, wind varies between days easily by 5x or more. Take for instance the troth in the middle of April (04) - that's nearly a week long drop to 1/5th the average output. Who's gonna jump in and pick up that effort? Also, look at the average power in relation to nameplate installed power, about a 4-5x relation. Germany requires 50-80 GW of constant production a day. So are they going to install 300 GW or more of nameplate wind capacity just to get the averages right? That'd be more than a doubling of their current installed capacity of 180 GW across all energy sources. Who's gonna pay for that? And who's gonna smooth the output and how much is that going to cost?(*)
So you see, I have done my homework and actually analyzed real data. Have you done yours?
(*) That same video shows a statistical calculation, taking real wind & solar production data from 2011, combining them and calculating the price of adding storage to the grid that would get around 4/7 of the average in reliable power. Results: ~100 billion Euros for 430 new pumped hydro plants (to replace 3-4 nuclear plants which would cost a fraction of that) or >250 billion Euros if battery storage were used. Keep in mind: these are based on actual combined wind & solar production curves, so you can't just dismiss them as being theoretical - this is based on actual data. You know, reality is that thing which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
1) do you really thing Germany has 60GW of interconnects with its neighbors?
2) wind lulls are strongly correlated across wide geographical areas (given that most of Germany's wind power is installed near the norther sea shore and Denmark & Poland are there too a lull there is going to affect them all)
3) separate countries aren't exactly receptive to relying 100% on their neighbors for real-time energy control, as that externalizes a lot of political power
4) one of the largest countries in Europe = "little patch of Germany"
5) "your little cherry picked graph" for a whole country of 80 million people over the course of a year. Riiight.
So is everybody supposed to back up German power production? Does the excess installed capacity get counted against German wind turbine price? Your solution to an unreliable resource of "just buy more of it!" is ludicrous on the face. If your car won't start 2/3 of the time you need it, no problem, just get 3 cars. Of course, it's so simple!
I would fully expect France to dominate in all categories, right?
The discussion was originally centered around Denmark vs. France. I never claimed France is the role model country in everything. Don't try and put words in my mouth.
If all the Euro countries has been as nuclear-dependent as France, the heat wave of 2003 would have been an even greater disaster and there would have been a fuckton of coal power needed as many of the hydro plants were also underperforming.
So obviously the other non-nuclear countries in Europe during 2003 were running on clean pixie-dust. Oh wait, no, reality just kicked in, the electrical grid was already burning coal to begin with, so I can't see how burning less coal during most of the year would be a bad thing.
Erm, when it's too hot to get enough water for cooling & the water levels are low enough to restrict hydropower & this would affect any "heat-engine based power plant", exactly what are you using as your "dispatchable short-term backup technology" to produce electricity?
Systems which either do not use large amounts of water cooling, such as OCGTs, diesel backup generators and/or high-temperature reactors or those which do not discharge coolant water into lakes and instead use cooling towers. High-temp reactors are especially attractive as their higher operating temperatures allow for efficient air cooling and lots of very interesting high-temp chemistry to be done using this waste heat.
Now the intermittency of solar & wind are well-known and in the case of sunshine, it's highly predictable. And it looks like some countries have done a remarkable job of forecasting 24-48 hr wind production for more than 5 yrs.
This won't solve the issue of prolonged lulls, however but it's not yet a major problem.
Prediction isn't the problem! Even *if* you have 100% accurate predictions, if the predictions are for a 1-2 week wind lull (and these *do* happen) and you don't have a whole separate set of electrical generation facilities online and ready (and who's gonna pay for that?), then your power grid is toast. If the answer is just to install as much gas backup as necessary, then account for them in your solar & wind plant capex and include its CO2 emissions from intermittent running in your carbon budget, otherwise it's just greenwashing and pretending to be economical & green when really you're not.
the real cost and it's significantly higher than what we're led to believe.
Claims made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. Besides, even if the prices were kept artificially low - I don't see French rate payers complain. Their level of taxation is lower than that of wind-Denmark and if the government can provide all of the necessary services and "refund" portion of their taxes in lowering the cost of electricity while meeting the carbon constraint, then what's not to like? Compared with Denmark, where taxes are higher, electricity costs are higher and CO2 emissions are higher, I'd say the French are getting much more bang for their invested buck. And that's what it ultimately comes down to: can the country afford the low-CO2 push and deliver on the promise and France has shown that the answer to both is yes over two decades ago. All of the rest of the issues you throw up are just distractions.
Bottom line is that I'm not convinced any single tech is capable of handling the electricity needs of modern nations in a rapidly warming world, not nuclear & not renewables. Barring some miracle breakthrough, we're going to keep on needing a mix.
And I never said nuclear is the only saving grace. I already said that the French grid is 15% hydro and I applaud their efforts to introduce some renewables on the periphery where it's sensible and economical. What they did do most right, though, is that they undertook the big savings effort early on (replac
Really? What happened to 4/5 of the wind production in the month of August here? I guess you know how to wave a magic wand and transfer 60GW worth of power from some magical wind farms on a different continent.
Thanks for the book recommendation, I'll try to give it a read, I honestly don't care what gets us there (and by "there" I mean zero CO2). I don't think nuclear itself is the complete answer and we need a wide array of technologies to go with it. I just don't happen to think that discounting nuclear outright because of some knee jerk emotional reaction is a sensible thing to do. "Anything and everything that'll get the job done" is my motto.
I'll try to get through without banging my head against the table too often, but every time I see Amory Lovins' crap I just want to kill myself. The guy has a totally rosy idea of how electrical and mechanical systems actually work and how we control them. He frequently overestimates stuff, such as this: "Biomass would supply about six times more energy in 2050 than in 2010". Biomass is pure and utter bunk and is just a way to subsidize certain industries. Germany has a rather sizable biomass energy sector and it has some rather unintended consequences (also some German reporting about the reality of biomass, especially interesting around 13:13 where they show massive deforestation in Brazil taking place to plant energy plants such as maize to export to Germany to get at the lucrative subsidies). In short, Amory Lovins lives to sell magic beans to believers.
France electricity prices do not reflect the actual cost. This is not a free market situation.
Most electrical systems are not "free market" systems, as rates are heavily regulated by rate commissions and production is tightly controlled by government planning and approval. In any case, can you demonstrate that France's electricity price is not real? I'm pretty sure rate payers there don't see more than the billed amount get debited each month from their accounts. From a taxation perspective France is also lower than Denmark, so what's your point again?
Even for existing technology nuclear is not really competive, actual 3rd generation projects see immensive cost explosion
There's a couple of reasons for this:
We haven't been building them, so building few units at a time is expensive. Curiously though constructing over 50 units over 15 years didn't bankrupt France in the 1970s and 1980s.
Environmentalists' pushback is creating a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy in that they delay construction projects, these then escalate in cost and the same environmental groups subsequently complain about delays and budget overruns.
So it can and has been done, all it takes is determination and united will.
thorium is currently just vapourware
Complete and utter vaporware, just like the other vaporware that was actually ready for deployment in 1994, but was killed by political action (although the concept having survived in Russia). As for LFTR, you are right, there are currently no ready and licensed designs, but that doesn't mean that we can't pursue them. The physics is clear, as is most of the chemistry. What needs to be really worked out are the operating principles and doing all of the detailed work to actually get a permitted design off the ground. If we'd spent a small fraction of the money sunk into renewables into these nuclear projects we could have had a design ready to roll a decade ago (we had the IFR, as I said before, but that was killed for political reasons).
Have a look over here and look specifically at the German interconnect. You'll see that it spends a majority of the time in the negative, meaning, power is going out over the link TO Germany. If you also look at the nuclear generation trend you'll see that it can do a certain amount of load-following, it's just usually not done for economic reasons, as nukes have such low fuel costs as opposed to capital costs that it's almost always advantageous for them to generating at nearly any price. Now Germany, that's a different story - they generate even when the price is negative, i.e. the grid operator has to pay users to take it (it's mostly exported to the Netherlands).
Clearly the price is heavily subsidized, with the subsidy going to the nuclear energy industry.
Ah, so we're into the "we're bad, but look, they're just as bad!" mode of argumentation. I'd ask you to provide evidence of this claim, but I know you won't, so I'll just roll with your assumption.
So subsidies can work both in favor and against a country's self interest - it depends on how they're applied. What needs to be considered is: do these subsidies redistribute taxation income in a manner that hurts the people? Let's look at taxation income and compare: France is again better off than Denmark. Sure that must mean that the extra money they spend on nuclear power means they have less available for important things like healthcare (nope, higher than Denmark, and better results too), military (nope, again higher than Denmark) and I'm sure I don't need to find you tons of links for the amounts of social security and benefits they get (which they are quite famous for). But hey, I found one thing where Denmark spends more: scientific spending. I'm sure the French are crying about it all the wayto the bank.
Anyway, even if the French did heavily subsidize their nuclear power generation (which I don't think is the case - maybe a project here or there providing some loan guarantees; that's pretty standard), it's their prerogative to do, if they perceive it as a strategic goal. And regardless, you see the end effect: their economy is healthy and electricity production emits a fraction of the CO2 of Denmark and has done so for the better part of two decades. Meanwhile the heavily subsidized systems like Denmark's and Germany's continue to fail to produce results and are actually trending in the opposite direction or staying static in terms of CO2 production, while electricity prices are exploding. From a purely pragmatic and economic standpoint, I know which I'd choose.
God that was such a bunch of oversimplifications down to downright untruths it's hard to know where to start:
Zero realistic cost-analysis. Wind doesn't blow? No problem, solar is here to save the day! (Except that just doubled the cost in installed generation capacity). Wind AND solar not there? No problem, geothermal/hydro/whatever! (Triple the cost.) And how do you site so much geothermal or hydro capacity, considering most places either don't have them (geothermal) or are already maxed out (hydro). Also hydro can't produce for one week at a crack, most dams are limited to 6-8 hours at full power. So gas peaker backup? (Quadruple the cost?) See these are the problems when you intend to build a grid with a reliability higher than that of some 3rd world country.
A demonstration of one ideal week is a sham. You need to look at worst case scenarios, not best case. And those are the things that dictate capital expenses, as you pay for installed capacity and only earn for delivered energy. If power plants (either fossil or hydro or geothermal) don't operate a considerable amount of their lifetimes, they'll either never ROI (i.e. go bankrupt or just won't get built at all) or they'll have to be operated at a loss to the utility, which will again just make electricity more expensive.
Transmission grids are only to temporarily even out partial outages of a small portion of generation capacity or sell of some small portion of excess capacity in one locality to another. What intermittent sources require is lots of high-capacity bi-directional transmission, i.e. tens of GW across long distances. These simply don't exist and constructing them will cost A LOT, not to speak of the amount of pushback from land owners.
Forecasting does absolutely nothing when your forecast is for a 2-week long wind lull. You can't just tell your users "sorry, no power for this week, wind ain't blowing". You have to do something. And we know what countries like Germany are doing: firing coal at record rates, increasing, not decreasing their CO2 emissions.
And all of this before we get into issues such as sub-synchronous resonance on the electric grid due to tens of thousands of turbines.
I'd also recommend, if you understand German, a talk by Hans Werner Sinn about the upcoming failings of the German Energiewende: http://youtu.be/m2eVYWVLtwE?t=... He calculates, taking real wind & solar daily production figures from 2011, that even if you take the seasonal opposite trend of wind & solar together and wanted to provide power at 99% reliability, it'd take an additional 100 billion Euros just to provide an extra 5 GW of reliable power (i.e. replace around 5 nuclear reactors which would have cost less than a quarter of that) through 450 new pumped hydro installations (Germany has ~35 of them now and new constructions are being protested everywhere), for which Germany probably doesn't even have the places to put them; or about an additional 254 billion Euros if you were to use the batteries of EVs (not the EVs themselves, just the batteries!).
In short, the problem is a lot harder than you think and a lot harder than that pretty video you sent me tries to make it out to be. These things look pretty from a semantic point of view unless you come down to real brass tacks, commit the numbers to paper and start making hard investment decisions. I'm on Bill Gates' team here and think that people deeply underestimate what a hard problem it is to rework the entire electrical grid to work reliably with these unreliable inputs.
First is that as many as 17 of their 58 plants have been knocked offline or scaled back in a single heatwave because of a shortage of water for cooling thereby needing to import from their neighbors to keep the lights on and costing up to $1300 per megawatt hour.
This would be true of almost any heat engine-based power plant, regardless of the source of the heating, save for a few very high-temperature systems which can live with air cooling. Also, a 30% reduction in production from an 70-80% resource implies an overall shortfall of ~20% - we know how to bridge those temporary loss gaps with hydro, fossil and other dispatchable short-term backup technology. Wind, meanwhile, experiences periodic 1-2 week long shortfalls of 90% or more, whereas solar famously loses 100% of its output every day and varies by as much as 70-80% in output over the course of the year. Good luck smoothing those curves out.
In short, there are engineering solutions to this problem that are known and understood today.
Also, they've been caught dumping nuclear waste in Russia.
So I looked into this and I can't find any authoritative sources for the claims that this was actual spent fuel instead of just pure uranium. I read there's going to be an investigation. Can you find the results of it? All I can find is Greenpeace bragging about "uncovering" it, but they never said it's spent nuclear fuel. In fact, they explicitly said it's UF6 (uranium hexafluoride), which is a common enrichment feedstock. After enrichment 90% of that is going to be depleted uranium tailings, which cannot be used in thermal reactors (which is why it doesn't make any sense to ship it back to France), but it's still usable as fuel for fast neutron reactors (which is why Russia might want to hold on to it - free fuel, w00t!). It's NOT spent nuclear fuel and certainly not fission products.
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot to congratulate China on their perfect record of nuclear safety. After all, there's no evidence to the contrary, right? :-D
Lack of evidence warrants neither congratulations nor badmouthing, I simply reserve judgement.
And any speculation by Western running dogs who dare to cast aspersions on the glorious People's Republic can be summarily dismissed, of course.
What's with the spiteful tone? They simply run their country differently, in a top-down approach. It has its problems but also its efficiencies. I'm not saying I'm a fan of all they do, I do take significant issue with their military expansionism, but I'm not going to bash somebody automatically for everything simply because of who they are.
Also don't take everything from Wikileaks, especially stuff found in US cables as Gospel. Even the article mentions that the fears could have been overblown due to the US' self-interest in promoting its own industry front-runner, Westinghouse's AP-1000 (of which the Chinese are also building several and the first one coming online this year). That is not to say that passively safe plants aren't better than older ones requiring engineered safety systems - of course they are. What I'm saying is that the Chinese take a pragmatic wide-swath approach, building everything they can get their hands on, accrue actual operational experience, after which they'll pick one winner and they'll start pumping them out like hot cakes (they always get full construction IP and licensing of their own variants of the foreign tech so that they can start building them themselves).
until LFTR / MSR designs pan out
While I'm an LFTR project supporter, I'd view it backwards, i.e. LFTR/MSR as a bridging technology until wind, solar & storage pan out. I will be the first to agree that nuclear technology has its dangers, though in the current overall picture, they are relatively benign. Still, one would have to be an idiot not to support an inexhaustible power source with little to no direct health impact - once REs sort their problems, I'll wholeheartedly endorse them.
Each of these cases is somewhat special in its own right. Sweden and Norway have low population density 15-20 people/km^2 and favorable geographical conditions with good hydro resources. Still, in 3 out of 4 cases nuclear was needed to help the effort.
Again, don't paint with a broad brush. I know they're not saints, I said that, but that doesn't mean everything they do is inherently insidious or suspect. I gave you a hypothesis that is perfectly innocent and plausible given the facts we know. Indeed, I've even shown how the known facts are incompatible with some waste dumping hypothesis. That doesn't mean it's impossible, just less likely. In absence of facts I reserve judgement. If you can find more info on this, I'd be grateful.
one-up on engineers
What makes you think I'm not an engineer myself? Also nice appeal to authority.
I knew most of this stuff before Google existed.
Then why not provide evidence to rebut my claims? Out of hand dismissal of mountains of evidence to your contrary and continued proclamation of victory while spouting insults, well, that just reflects much worse on you than it does on me.
Ever thought about wind turbines are easy to take offline and thermal is not?
I assume you mean taking offline excess capacity when its not needed. Sure taking a wind turbine offline when it's not needed is easy enough, but this significantly lowers the capacity factor of these devices, increases LCOE and prolongs ROI.
You are still not answering about that 60GW
I honestly can't explain it any more simply than that. Look, it really boils down to these questions: if you build enough wind to cover 80% of peak demand, what happens during the days when REs produce 1/10 of their nominal capacity (as does happen - if you don't believe the tons of sources I've provided for this, then you're just a fact denier). Do you build so much capacity that your minimum values are above peak demand (and waste tons of it by not using it when its available)? Or do you build transmission infrastructure capable of carrying 80% of peak demand in from elsewhere (which does not currently exist)? Or do you build shitloads of energy storage (which is expensive as heck)? Or do you build additional traditional backup peaker capacity, which effectively doubles your system cost (before we get to transmission and switching issues)? You have to do one of those. Answering "none of the above" without providing an alternative is not an answer.
instead of lies from "no wind" little shits like you
Keep the hate coming, I love confirmation that you don't have any arguments to respond with.
You might counter that a portion of that energy can come from hydro & biomass. Hydro is unfortunately already nearly maxed out (*) and biomass has problems with cost and repurposing of lots of farm land for energy crop production (and questionable CO2 benefits due to the excessive use of industrially produced fertilizers and use of heavy agricultural machinery running on fossil fuels; though there is room for improvement here, so no biggie). Still, this requires installing extra capacity, which must be counted against the cost of RE sources of energy. The alternative is to install energy storage on a massive scale to smooth out the intermittent sources and deliver power when needed - not an easy proposition either.
(*) Source: "23% of total technically feasible hydropower potential is exploited in China, 82% in USA, 65% in Canada, 73% in Germany"
No wind anywhere? What crap! Why should I remain silent when someone is pushing that line to try to bully someone else?
Is citing facts bullying? Read the graph. 32 GW nameplate installed capacity. Overall production average on 04/06/2013 + 04/07/2013 less than 1/20 of that, dropping to 1 GW for a few hours around noon 02/06/2013 and to almost zero around noon 04/25/2013).
If you are not being serious then you are either far more stupid than is likely or dishonest. I hate how this place is now infested with "end justifies the means" little shits like you.
Name calling is usually the last resort of a man with no evidence or facts to back his claims. I generally do not enjoy gloating, but you sure do make it hard for me not to feel good about my positions.
Obviously you need enough capacity to ensure a certain baseline
How about 30x the load (nameplate installed ~30 GW, 99% guaranteed ~0.9 GW; that's over the whole country). With Germany's ~70 GW average consumption you'll need to install ~2100 GW of nameplate power (or about half of the world's current installed power capacity). Assuming 10 MW wind turbines (which have around 200m rotor diameters) you'll need ~210000 turbines. As a general rule of thumb, wind turbine spacing suggests 6-10 rotor diameters, so taking 8 as the neat central value, each such turbine requires ~2 square km of space around it. 210000 turbines times 2 square km is about 50000 square km more than the entire area of Germany (most of which isn't particularly rich in wind resources anyways), so clearly something needs to be done about lowering this requirement. You'll need storage. And that's expensive and frequently also area-intensive.
There are no simple solutions and there's a decent chance they won't ever materialize. That is not to say that they can't. Obviously if they do come around, so much the better. However, at present storing energy at grid-scale is extremely hard and most lay people deeply underestimate how hard and costly it's going to be to resolve.
There's a difference between saying something is oversimplified to bordering on untruth and calling somebody "possibly as stupid" (and the "you cannot be" at the front is just some passive-aggresive BS pretend game) and "pretended stupidity", implying I'm not being serious. I didn't call them liars - that would imply that I think they know they are telling untruths. They might just as well be misinformed, overly optimistic and/or just plain wrong (which is what I actually think they and you are). Throughout the rest of my posts my tone was always reserved and measured. It was you who escalated it. If your intention is to start name calling, go troll some other person. I'm interested in hard data and demonstrable facts, not assertions and mud flinging.
How is that sixty?
Your reading comprehension needs some work. I said "With larger installations on a country the scale of Germany what will change is only the absolute values, but the relative proportions of them are going to stay mostly the same" and that "Germany requires 50-80 GW of constant production a day." Obviously if 80% of the 80 GW were to come from renewables, about 60 GW is going to be required and due to observed 30:1 shortfalls in production, effectively 60 GW worth of spare capacity will be required. You see, you need to first understand the context of the numbers I give you and then start critiquing them. You can't just point at two sentences and laugh because the numbers in them are different. I'm not going to explain things to you as if to a 12 year-old.
WTF is it with you armchair "one true energy" zealots?
I'm not saying all can be done with one source. I explicitly acknowledged that 15% of France's load is hydro and I'm well aware that well over 90% of Norway's is - clearly for Norway nuclear makes little sense, since they have plenty of resource and very sparse population. I'm comparing apples to apples, France and Germany (and partly Denmark).
since I was working in the electricity generating industry
I kinda doubt that, as you seem not to have any grasp of the size of the problems posed by integrating intermittent sources at any meaningful percentages, but it's possible you've got a rosy view, since by your own admission, you haven't worked in power generation for a decade (when RE proportions were much lower in the discussed countries).
What's with the name calling and vitriol? Usually I see people reacting this way when they hold and defend beliefs that are based on faith rather than hard data.
In any case, you should re-read what I wrote: "given that most of Germany's wind power is installed near the norther sea shore and Denmark & Poland are there too". A localized loss of wind is going to affect a majority of production in both Germany and Denmark. We've mapped wind resources out very accurately, you know.
Do you really think Germany was down 60GW of wind power at any one instant?
This is a graph of actual wind production figures in Germany at daily resolution for 2011. Even if you don't speak German, the three yellow lines in there represent: nameplate installed capacity (29.06 GW), average power (5.145 GW) and minimal power delivery at 99% confidence (0.918 GW), all at 1 day resolutions (the problems get much worse at finer resolutions). I'd call 1/30th of the install nameplate capacity pretty much zero. With larger installations on a country the scale of Germany (not a small country by any account) what will change is only the absolute values, but the relative proportions of them are going to stay mostly the same. Even if you take the average into account the average production as your goal, wind varies between days easily by 5x or more. Take for instance the troth in the middle of April (04) - that's nearly a week long drop to 1/5th the average output. Who's gonna jump in and pick up that effort? Also, look at the average power in relation to nameplate installed power, about a 4-5x relation. Germany requires 50-80 GW of constant production a day. So are they going to install 300 GW or more of nameplate wind capacity just to get the averages right? That'd be more than a doubling of their current installed capacity of 180 GW across all energy sources. Who's gonna pay for that? And who's gonna smooth the output and how much is that going to cost?(*)
So you see, I have done my homework and actually analyzed real data. Have you done yours?
(*) That same video shows a statistical calculation, taking real wind & solar production data from 2011, combining them and calculating the price of adding storage to the grid that would get around 4/7 of the average in reliable power. Results: ~100 billion Euros for 430 new pumped hydro plants (to replace 3-4 nuclear plants which would cost a fraction of that) or >250 billion Euros if battery storage were used. Keep in mind: these are based on actual combined wind & solar production curves, so you can't just dismiss them as being theoretical - this is based on actual data. You know, reality is that thing which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
1) do you really thing Germany has 60GW of interconnects with its neighbors?
2) wind lulls are strongly correlated across wide geographical areas (given that most of Germany's wind power is installed near the norther sea shore and Denmark & Poland are there too a lull there is going to affect them all)
3) separate countries aren't exactly receptive to relying 100% on their neighbors for real-time energy control, as that externalizes a lot of political power
4) one of the largest countries in Europe = "little patch of Germany"
5) "your little cherry picked graph" for a whole country of 80 million people over the course of a year. Riiight.
So is everybody supposed to back up German power production? Does the excess installed capacity get counted against German wind turbine price? Your solution to an unreliable resource of "just buy more of it!" is ludicrous on the face. If your car won't start 2/3 of the time you need it, no problem, just get 3 cars. Of course, it's so simple!
I would fully expect France to dominate in all categories, right?
The discussion was originally centered around Denmark vs. France. I never claimed France is the role model country in everything. Don't try and put words in my mouth.
If all the Euro countries has been as nuclear-dependent as France, the heat wave of 2003 would have been an even greater disaster and there would have been a fuckton of coal power needed as many of the hydro plants were also underperforming.
So obviously the other non-nuclear countries in Europe during 2003 were running on clean pixie-dust. Oh wait, no, reality just kicked in, the electrical grid was already burning coal to begin with, so I can't see how burning less coal during most of the year would be a bad thing.
Erm, when it's too hot to get enough water for cooling & the water levels are low enough to restrict hydropower & this would affect any "heat-engine based power plant", exactly what are you using as your "dispatchable short-term backup technology" to produce electricity?
Systems which either do not use large amounts of water cooling, such as OCGTs, diesel backup generators and/or high-temperature reactors or those which do not discharge coolant water into lakes and instead use cooling towers. High-temp reactors are especially attractive as their higher operating temperatures allow for efficient air cooling and lots of very interesting high-temp chemistry to be done using this waste heat.
Now the intermittency of solar & wind are well-known and in the case of sunshine, it's highly predictable. And it looks like some countries have done a remarkable job of forecasting 24-48 hr wind production for more than 5 yrs. This won't solve the issue of prolonged lulls, however but it's not yet a major problem.
Prediction isn't the problem! Even *if* you have 100% accurate predictions, if the predictions are for a 1-2 week wind lull (and these *do* happen) and you don't have a whole separate set of electrical generation facilities online and ready (and who's gonna pay for that?), then your power grid is toast. If the answer is just to install as much gas backup as necessary, then account for them in your solar & wind plant capex and include its CO2 emissions from intermittent running in your carbon budget, otherwise it's just greenwashing and pretending to be economical & green when really you're not.
the real cost and it's significantly higher than what we're led to believe.
Claims made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. Besides, even if the prices were kept artificially low - I don't see French rate payers complain. Their level of taxation is lower than that of wind-Denmark and if the government can provide all of the necessary services and "refund" portion of their taxes in lowering the cost of electricity while meeting the carbon constraint, then what's not to like? Compared with Denmark, where taxes are higher, electricity costs are higher and CO2 emissions are higher, I'd say the French are getting much more bang for their invested buck. And that's what it ultimately comes down to: can the country afford the low-CO2 push and deliver on the promise and France has shown that the answer to both is yes over two decades ago. All of the rest of the issues you throw up are just distractions.
Bottom line is that I'm not convinced any single tech is capable of handling the electricity needs of modern nations in a rapidly warming world, not nuclear & not renewables. Barring some miracle breakthrough, we're going to keep on needing a mix.
And I never said nuclear is the only saving grace. I already said that the French grid is 15% hydro and I applaud their efforts to introduce some renewables on the periphery where it's sensible and economical. What they did do most right, though, is that they undertook the big savings effort early on (replac
Really? What happened to 4/5 of the wind production in the month of August here? I guess you know how to wave a magic wand and transfer 60GW worth of power from some magical wind farms on a different continent.
Thanks for the book recommendation, I'll try to give it a read, I honestly don't care what gets us there (and by "there" I mean zero CO2). I don't think nuclear itself is the complete answer and we need a wide array of technologies to go with it. I just don't happen to think that discounting nuclear outright because of some knee jerk emotional reaction is a sensible thing to do. "Anything and everything that'll get the job done" is my motto.
I'll try to get through without banging my head against the table too often, but every time I see Amory Lovins' crap I just want to kill myself. The guy has a totally rosy idea of how electrical and mechanical systems actually work and how we control them. He frequently overestimates stuff, such as this: "Biomass would supply about six times more energy in 2050 than in 2010". Biomass is pure and utter bunk and is just a way to subsidize certain industries. Germany has a rather sizable biomass energy sector and it has some rather unintended consequences (also some German reporting about the reality of biomass, especially interesting around 13:13 where they show massive deforestation in Brazil taking place to plant energy plants such as maize to export to Germany to get at the lucrative subsidies). In short, Amory Lovins lives to sell magic beans to believers.
France electricity prices do not reflect the actual cost. This is not a free market situation.
Most electrical systems are not "free market" systems, as rates are heavily regulated by rate commissions and production is tightly controlled by government planning and approval. In any case, can you demonstrate that France's electricity price is not real? I'm pretty sure rate payers there don't see more than the billed amount get debited each month from their accounts. From a taxation perspective France is also lower than Denmark, so what's your point again?
Even for existing technology nuclear is not really competive, actual 3rd generation projects see immensive cost explosion
There's a couple of reasons for this:
So it can and has been done, all it takes is determination and united will.
thorium is currently just vapourware
Complete and utter vaporware, just like the other vaporware that was actually ready for deployment in 1994, but was killed by political action (although the concept having survived in Russia). As for LFTR, you are right, there are currently no ready and licensed designs, but that doesn't mean that we can't pursue them. The physics is clear, as is most of the chemistry. What needs to be really worked out are the operating principles and doing all of the detailed work to actually get a permitted design off the ground. If we'd spent a small fraction of the money sunk into renewables into these nuclear projects we could have had a design ready to roll a decade ago (we had the IFR, as I said before, but that was killed for political reasons).
Clearly the price is heavily subsidized, with the subsidy going to the nuclear energy industry.
Ah, so we're into the "we're bad, but look, they're just as bad!" mode of argumentation. I'd ask you to provide evidence of this claim, but I know you won't, so I'll just roll with your assumption.
So subsidies can work both in favor and against a country's self interest - it depends on how they're applied. What needs to be considered is: do these subsidies redistribute taxation income in a manner that hurts the people? Let's look at taxation income and compare: France is again better off than Denmark. Sure that must mean that the extra money they spend on nuclear power means they have less available for important things like healthcare (nope, higher than Denmark, and better results too), military (nope, again higher than Denmark) and I'm sure I don't need to find you tons of links for the amounts of social security and benefits they get (which they are quite famous for). But hey, I found one thing where Denmark spends more: scientific spending. I'm sure the French are crying about it all the way to the bank.
Anyway, even if the French did heavily subsidize their nuclear power generation (which I don't think is the case - maybe a project here or there providing some loan guarantees; that's pretty standard), it's their prerogative to do, if they perceive it as a strategic goal. And regardless, you see the end effect: their economy is healthy and electricity production emits a fraction of the CO2 of Denmark and has done so for the better part of two decades. Meanwhile the heavily subsidized systems like Denmark's and Germany's continue to fail to produce results and are actually trending in the opposite direction or staying static in terms of CO2 production, while electricity prices are exploding. From a purely pragmatic and economic standpoint, I know which I'd choose.
Sorry, the sentence saying "Notice the " was supposed to say: "Notice the drop in wind generation to 1GW during most of the month of June?"
I'd also recommend, if you understand German, a talk by Hans Werner Sinn about the upcoming failings of the German Energiewende: http://youtu.be/m2eVYWVLtwE?t=... He calculates, taking real wind & solar daily production figures from 2011, that even if you take the seasonal opposite trend of wind & solar together and wanted to provide power at 99% reliability, it'd take an additional 100 billion Euros just to provide an extra 5 GW of reliable power (i.e. replace around 5 nuclear reactors which would have cost less than a quarter of that) through 450 new pumped hydro installations (Germany has ~35 of them now and new constructions are being protested everywhere), for which Germany probably doesn't even have the places to put them; or about an additional 254 billion Euros if you were to use the batteries of EVs (not the EVs themselves, just the batteries!).
In short, the problem is a lot harder than you think and a lot harder than that pretty video you sent me tries to make it out to be. These things look pretty from a semantic point of view unless you come down to real brass tacks, commit the numbers to paper and start making hard investment decisions. I'm on Bill Gates' team here and think that people deeply underestimate what a hard problem it is to rework the entire electrical grid to work reliably with these unreliable inputs.
First is that as many as 17 of their 58 plants have been knocked offline or scaled back in a single heatwave because of a shortage of water for cooling thereby needing to import from their neighbors to keep the lights on and costing up to $1300 per megawatt hour.
This would be true of almost any heat engine-based power plant, regardless of the source of the heating, save for a few very high-temperature systems which can live with air cooling. Also, a 30% reduction in production from an 70-80% resource implies an overall shortfall of ~20% - we know how to bridge those temporary loss gaps with hydro, fossil and other dispatchable short-term backup technology. Wind, meanwhile, experiences periodic 1-2 week long shortfalls of 90% or more, whereas solar famously loses 100% of its output every day and varies by as much as 70-80% in output over the course of the year. Good luck smoothing those curves out.
In short, there are engineering solutions to this problem that are known and understood today.
Also, they've been caught dumping nuclear waste in Russia.
So I looked into this and I can't find any authoritative sources for the claims that this was actual spent fuel instead of just pure uranium. I read there's going to be an investigation. Can you find the results of it? All I can find is Greenpeace bragging about "uncovering" it, but they never said it's spent nuclear fuel. In fact, they explicitly said it's UF6 (uranium hexafluoride), which is a common enrichment feedstock. After enrichment 90% of that is going to be depleted uranium tailings, which cannot be used in thermal reactors (which is why it doesn't make any sense to ship it back to France), but it's still usable as fuel for fast neutron reactors (which is why Russia might want to hold on to it - free fuel, w00t!). It's NOT spent nuclear fuel and certainly not fission products.