a gas pipeline NO, that is already existing, that is the point.
Oh yes, my friend, you need to build it to your H2 generator rig and maintain it. You'll need a pressurization substation and an industrial connector. You'll also need to pay for maintaining the existing grid.
and a gas plant. NO, that is already existing, that is the point.
Again, you're wrong here. For one, Germany has a very small amount of these, only about 10% of electricity is provided by gas. Seeing as 2/3 of your power would need to be pushed into H2 and subsequently into a gas plant, you'll be deriving ~67% of your overall power generation from gas plants (regardless if burning NG or H2 or pixie dust). So who's going to build those extra 57% worth of capacity? Somebody who expects to make a profit from it, be it an independent utility, or the wind farm operator. If it's the former, they'll be buying your 5%H2-laced gas (let's call it "shitgas" for reasons I'll explain later) at market prices and those are pretty darn low and selling the generated electricity on to the consumer.
The economical calculation for that is pretty simple:
It cost the wind farm X to produce 1 Joule of electrical energy.
They'll convert that 1 Joule of electrical energy and generate a given amount of hydrogen at efficiency Y, which means upon combustion of the generated hydrogen, you get "1 Joule x Z" back AS HEAT ENEGY.
The gas plant takes the heat energy and converts it back to electrical energy at efficiency Z (60% for CCGT, 29% for OCGT) and sell it on to the power grid.
Thus, your original production cost to create Joule of energy is X' = X / (Y x Z). If Y=0.75 (best currently available electrolysis rigs at lab scale) and Z = 0.6 (best currently available CCGT plants), you get 2.22x multiplication of your original production costs (what it costs to provide 1 Joule TO THE GRID). If you take a more realistic Y=0.5 and Z = 0.5 (due to intermittent running), you get a 4x multiplication of your production costs. So effectively, the wind farm is forced to sell its generated electricity (as H2) at a 2-4x higher price in order to maintain the same level of profitability.
No, the loss is max 20% when H2 is generated
Please do point me to that miracle grid-scale electrolysis rig, I must have missed it.
the H2 is piped into an EXISTING gas grid, CONSUMED IMMEDIATELY (more or less) in gas ovens used for heating and cooking, so the total amount of H2 gas produced is only limited by the current consumption.
Except you forgot that you can at best get a 1% contribution to your energy generation from burning this gas for heating. Heating, however, consumes only about 2-3x as much energy as electrical generation, so even assuming you took all of your surplus electricity (roughly 2/3 with wind) and transferred it into the heat market, you'd essentially be trying to supply ~20-25% of the heating energy from H2, which you simply can't. As we've established, your carbon-free energy contribution to heating tops out at 1-2%. IOW, even if you could convert all of your surplus electrical power into H2 for heating at no extra cost, 90% of your surplus power generation would still be inadmissible into the gas grid.
You simply forget that (after I pointed out that many of your assumptions are wrong) that ROIs are not that relevant when you are working at plans and projects that change the world and take decades to finish.
So you believe in free lunches. Okay, I think I'm done here:D Maybe next time try and ask be baker for free bread, the bus for a free ride and the local utility company for free power and see how that goes for you.
It boggles the mind that you can say "dick all would have happened (and that's mostly what did happen" regarding Fukushima. It's clear that the vast majority of the population of japan do not agree with you.
And 78% of the US population believes in angels. Popular vote does not determine reality. Moreover, your reading comprehension needs work again, as had you not cut my sentence off there and torn it out of context, you'd see that I was comparing it to the tsunami that drowned nearly 20000 people.
It is estimated that, assuming linear dose response, ultimately ~200 excess cancer deaths will result from Fukushima over the coming years, most of them in Japan. Are those inconsequential? Of course not. But keep it in context - on that day alone 20000 people drowned, millions have been displaced, their homes gone and vast tracts of shoreline and coastal cities and associated infrastructure have been utterly destroyed. If you look at it honestly, you have to conclude that living in a coastal city in Japan is vastly more dangerous than the occasional nuclear accident. But people aren't rational beings and the media know fear sells news, so guess which story you heard on TV?
Nuclear can do no wrong in your eyes. Are you aware that Fukushima is leaking at least 400 tonnes of highly radioactive water every day and it could be over 1000 tonnes a day, the ice wall the tried failed.
Care to elaborate on what "highly radioactive" is? We have ways to measure that. Also, where did you get that crazy figure. I couldn't find it anywhere on any reputable news source, only on some fear mongering blogs. Besides, while certainly not something to be dismissed as inconsequential, leaks of this nature into the ocean get diluted down beyond background levels pretty quickly.
Anyways, stop frequenting crazy conspiracy blogs and listening to professional nutjobs like Helen Caldicott or Arnie Gundersen, it'll rot your mind. Read some research on radiation effects and you'll see that it's far less problematic in the big picture than the media would like to make you believe.
(3c for wind because current PPAs are averaging 2.5c and the subsidy is 2.2c for the first ten years)
You're comparing current electricity sales prices for wind with LCOE for new nuclear power plants. Good job on comparing apples to oranges.
Hoover dam capacity: 352,000km3
Uh oh, massive reading fail on your part. The Wikipedia page actually says "28,537,000 acreft (35.200 km3)" - that's thirty-five-point-two cubic kilometers, so right out of the door you're wrong by 4 orders of magnitude - quite an achievement, and it only gets worse from here. In order to be able to use, say, 10% of the reservoir's capacity for energy storage (which is a big ask, considering it's been at ~2/3 capacity since the 90s due to droughts and extensive water use by the population), you need another reservoir (or set of reservoirs) of at least 10% the volume at a suitable lower position close to the dam. The nearest possible suitable reservoir is lake Mohave, unfortunately it's 50km downstream, so that ain't gonna happen. But let's imagine you find some way to blast the mountains right beyond the dam apart to create a nice little reservoir at 100m height difference (the dam itself is ~200m tall, but the water reaches all the way to its bottom and it's not always full, so we'll split the baby and use 100m average water height to simplify the calculation). So how much does that give you?
3.5 x 10^9 m^3 x 100m x 9.81m/s^2 x 0.75 (roundtrip efficiency) ~= 2.575 TWh
That'll give you the power to back up the US power supply for around 4 hours, or countries the size of Germany for about 2 days. Your goal is ~14 days, so you're still about an order of magnitude short. And that's using the largest water reservoir in America.
So if Uranium is 10% of TCO and reprocessed Uranium costs over 10x as much then nuclear would end up costing well over 20c per kWh would it not.
Not necessarily. Fuel costs consist of several components, for Uranium it's mining, refining (yellowcake production), enrichment and fuel fabrication. It depends on the breakdown and efficiency of use that dictates price contribution to operation, so it'd probably far less (I've heard estimates where a 5x price hike on raw uranium would only result in about a 2x bump on the fuel price). What you also neglected to consider is that at around 3-5x current mining price, we'd probably have tens of thousands of viable reserves, so the 10x is quite a high margin. Lastly there's the usage efficiency. The LWR once-through cycle is pretty inefficient. With higher burnup or higher breeding ratios (all reactors breed some fuel, just typical LWRs don't do it much), all of which are achievable in modern reactors, the cost goes down. Or we could use fast breeders for which the only cost is the initial fissile load - after that they run on depleted uranium, of which there is a heck of a lot (100x more than fissile).
Sooner or later we will have to go 100% renewable, why wait, why not invest in renewables whilst is easy to do, if we leave it until it's too late the shit will hit the fan.
Well, the "sooner or later" might in fact be quite a ways away. Regardless, I broadly agree with you, but there's no need to rush things or exclude one path over another. I'd like to see us invest in anything and everything that reduces CO2 emissions - that's the real pressing issue - be it renewables, nuclear, carbon sequestration or burning dung for power, for that matter. R&D being currently invested in all of these is currently peanuts.
Nuclear power is a short term solution which causes long term problems.
It doesn't have to. We have ways to burn down the waste to short-term stuff. We just have to use it.
If humans were capable of handling nuclear power without cocking it up regularly then I would support it, but they are not.
That's a bit of a pessimistic way to look at it. We've had a pretty good half century, generated shitloads of zero-CO2 energy with it and only managed to cock it up a few times (and while each of these was serious, they pale in comparison to the number of deaths you see in, say, transportation, every year). Don't you not think the cavemen that discovered fire have not burned themselves quite often and wanted to throw away that dangerous thing? But their curiosity prevailed and we today couldn't imagine life without it. "Nuclear fire" is kinda similar, we're new to it (we didn't even know atoms could fission before 1938 - the TV is older than that), learning and making mistakes, but ultimately I'm an optimist and largely believe in the ingenuity of humanity to master a wonderful new power source and use it for good.
Either we shut down the wind plant and store nothing.
Right, that's forgone revenue.
Or we use the wind plants excess energy to create H2. Obviously after we have created H2 we can burn it in a gas turbine or a simple 'car engine'.
So you take your invested $ to generate this power, divide it by the efficiency of your H2 generation rig, and that's what you get back. Oh and you also just expanded your capital costs by the cost of an industrial-sized H2 generator, a gas pipeline and a gas plant.
Again: wind surplus, use it to create H2 or lose it.
Gas grid: use it to distribute the H2 or lose it.
Gas turbine: use the grid or lose it.
See, you understand how forgone revenue works. Instead of losing all of the power from curtailed wind turbines, you only lose ~3/4 of it by using the energy -> H2 -> energy conversion method, in effect increasing your cost to produce it by a factor of 4. And you add capital costs for an H2 generation rig and gas grid and gas plant operations. Also, selling into the gas market means you're competing with the NG providers, so you'll be selling at whatever they're selling at (and they tend to sell _really_ cheap).
Bottom line the wind plant only makes normal gas less CO2 heavy
Wow, that 1% reduction is really going to save the planet. Remember, you're limited by a volumetric concentration of 5%.
The circumstances where you really use the gas grid to produce electric power are rare, as you have ordinary power plants to do that.
So what's worse is you're just selling a natural gas substitute produced at massive expense:D
So bottom line it is a win that 'cost nothing' regardless of your 'efficiency' calculations.
Whoa now young man, that's a bold statement. I suppose you're not familiar with the acronyms ROI (return on investment) and O&M (operations and maintenance), but in the world of actual projects that cost money to build and run, they reign supreme. Lost production for a wind farm is as serious as it is for anyone (your investors expect a return and profit - try and tell them your ROI is maybe 3-4x as long as you had originally planned and they'll eat you alive).
Capital costs represent between 60 and 75 percent of the cost of a nuclear plant
You know that sounds about right. If we take the high estimate (75%) to be for a reactor operating for a relatively short 40 years at a cap factor of 0.8, a 1 GW unit with a levelized purchase price of $9 billion would cost $32/MWh, so adjusted to 100% this comes to roughly $42/MWh. The remaining 25% is fuel, O&M and decommissioning costs. Of course this significantly depends on what deal you get on the unit and unfortunately real reactor purchase prices are a closely guarded secret of the manufacturers. Prices can range from the sensible (Unit 1 costing about $3B in inflation-adjusted present day dollars and Units 2&3 being constructed for about $4.5B a pop) all the way to the downright insane (honestly the idiots who approved this project ought to have their heads examined, if AP1000s can be had in the US for over twice as cheap, as can be VVER-1200s and ABWRs).
Re Nuclear capital costs, the simple fact is US nuclear plants capital costs are already paid.
In 25 years the energy from Wind and solar being installed today will likely be a lot cheaper than 44 per MWh. (Turbines are expected to last over 40 years, solar PV loses about 12-20% of it's efficiency over 25 years.)
Well, that remains to be seen. Current wind installation prices are getting close to leveling out. The future will show more.
no doubt they are leaving costs out. Every other site states nuclear costs about 10c/kWh.
The $44/MWh is for existing operating plants, whereas $10c/kWh is for new builds and takes into account things such as uncertainties in licensing, delays and a host of other potentialities for cost-rising elements. Financial prognosis is a black art.
In the UK the govt are offering EDF over 15c for every kWh.
I agree that Hinkley Point C should have been sent down the drain, the single most expensive power plant on the face of planet. For that matter, Areva's EPR is turning out to be a massively overpriced unit, at least the way it's being built outside of China. My guess is they're probably trying to save Areva from the massively overpriced fiasco that is Olkilouto 3 (the cost overruns there are largely being absorbed by Areva), in order to preserve what little nuclear industry is left in Europe. Don't know the details of the deal, but personally I'd tear the idiots at Areva a new one.
The Govt site states current wind energy here costs 5 to 6.6c per kWh.
That's because it doesn't include the cost of providing zero-CO2 storage and current investment confidence is high. Add the storage and Hinkley Point C will seem cheap. Of course that cost doesn't materialize until wind gets fairly high in the generator percentages, so it'll take a while for it to materialize.
How many more Hanfords, Fukushimas and Chernobyls are there going to be be we realise we are no good at managing nuclear power?
Hanford was a military weapons production installation, not a power plant. Don't be dishonest in including it in these.
As for Fukushima - we'll see how new plant designs do. Had they been running an ABWR or even an AP1000 at Fukushima, dick all would have happened (and that's mostly what did happen, but thanks to mass hysteria it got blown wildly out of proportion; never mind the 20000 tsunami-drowned suckers, NUCULAR ACCIDENT!!111!). Oh and Chernobyl was just a criminally bad design in an almost completely unregulated and curtained state-controlled industry. By that logic you could try and paint the nuclear power industry with the legacy of nuclear weapons. Oh wait, you already did (Hanford). Well, never mind then.;)
No, like Hydro, pumped hydro, wave power, tidal schemes, solar thermal, solar PV, compressed air storage, biowaste energy, battery storage etc.
Hydro: already maxed out in the west. Pumped hydro: calculate the scale involved, it ain't pretty. Wave power is so expensive it's not funny, as is solar thermal. Solar PV is intermittent - see linked graph again, it won't cut it. CAES has some potential, but is as yet much more expensive than pumped hydro. Biowaste accounts for a drop in the bucket - there's simply not enough of it. Batteries are horribly expensive at grid scale and environmentally very damaging (Ever seen a lithium mine? Or maybe you prefer lead-acid? And Vanadium redox is still more expensive than pumped hydro). You forgot to mention flywheels.
The point is, you need to understand the problem quantitatively. Run some calculations on the system cost and scale and post them - it's a sobering experience. And don't forget to include the developing world, they want power too, you know.
Cheap gas and oil won't be around for long, coal is the only real fossil fuel problem.
So CO2 emissions from gas and fracking are a-OK? You do realize that natural gas still emits around 50% of the CO2 per unit of energy, not to mention that any small methane leak is also a serious source of GHGs, right?
There is currently enough Uranium reserve to continue to power the nuclear industry at it 10% of global energy rate for 200 years. So if every country were to go nuclear like France, how long would that last?
This is grossly oversimplifying. First you need to understand the relationship between cost and recoverable resources. In general, double the cost, you increase recoverable resources 10-fold. Even using today's nuclear power designs (which I'm not a big fan of, but consider them a necessary evil on the way to better designs), the fuel cost is only about 10% of the TCO of the plant (the rest being construction, O&M and decommissioning), so if you double their raw fuel cost, their LCOE grows only very modestly (a good chunk of their fuel cost is also enrichment and fabrication). So if you accept, say, a 5% increase in their LCOE, you'd have enough Uranium to power all of the world for another 200-300 years. Now you might say that's not enough for fusion to come along, so read on.
The real prospect, is for new reactor designs that either breed fuel from fertile uranium (of which there is approx. 100x as much as directly fissile uranium) or use the existing stock a lot more efficient (e.g. the denatured molten-salt, not a breeder, but a lot simpler than the LFTR being hyped around the net). Breeders are not paper reactors, they exist and are operating. They have their challenges, but give a significant improvement. The molten-salt ones pile a bunch of very attractive safety on top.
Should we *only* do nuclear and not invest in renewables like wind, solar, geothermal and tidal? Absolutely not! We should do all of these! Use what's appropriate where it's appropriate. Iceland is a geothermal bomb, so nuclear there is stupid. Arizona has lots of solar, with a little improvement in salt storage, that could pan out. And where nothing else works really exceptionally well (like central Europe:D), use a mix of nuclear, hydro and whatever else you can lay your hands on.
I do understand that, but it's financial storage that loses around 3/4 of your stored product. That means that whatever power you time shift will come out around 4x as expensive. For example, say you are running a 100% wind-based grid (it's a little more complicated, but just for simplicity's sake). Since wind has around 1/3 cap factor (actually around 25% in Germany, but whatever), that means you need to overbuild by about a factor 3x in terms of MW installed relative to the average MW of consumption. That means about 2/3 of your produced energy will come from times when there's too much of it (i.e. you need to store it). Now if your wind plant has a cost of producing a unit of energy of $X/kWh (this is referred to as LCOE), then only 1/3 of that value can be directly fed into the grid at any one time and on average 2/3 of it you need to time-shift. Given that the time-shifting technology inflates the cost of the production 4-fold, it means that your LCOE is in fact 3x higher than if you didn't have to do the time-shifting in the first place. *That's* the hidden cost of intermittency and that's assuming the time-shifting system is free (i.e. doesn't cost anything to build & maintain). Add that to the equation and it starts to look like a pretty bleak proposition.
This problem starts to occur in general (not just specific to H2-production) once intermittent sources hit a market penetration about equal to their capacity factor. This is not the case in Germany yet, but it's starting to become one. They're at ~15% now (rest being hydro & biomass), but once they get to around say 20-25%, you'll start seeing the weeping and gnashing of teeth as grid operators will start to curtail intermittent generators - after that, they'll be either forced to discard unrealized production (in economics this is a loss called "foregone earnings"), or forced to pay for its time-shifting. In short, intermittent renewables get cheaper with volume only up to a point, after which the problem of their intermittency slowly grows until it becomes overwhelming.
Now this is only a simplified model, but it gives you an idea of the mechanics at play here.
at a loss of roughly 50% due to electrolysis [the actual loss is less then 20%, I don't get where this/. myth comes from that electrolysis is inefficient
Well, it depends on the exact technology used. The most efficient numbers you quote are high-temp electrolyzers, but they require a readily available heat source (not the case for wind farms, unless you heat it with electricity, which diminishes efficiency again, or use NG heating, which makes it not zero-CO2). The really cheap ones use inefficient electrodes that degrade. The 50% number is a rough ballpark estimate of what can be achieved with sort of run of the mill readily available large-scale equipment.
So again: we don't talk about CO2
And that's one of the fundamental problems I find with discussing renewables with wind & solar proponents. Reducing CO2 has to be the first and primary goal, not installing tons of renewables. Installing renewables *might* be the answer to the task, but it has to always be moderated by the question of how to most efficiently reduce CO2 emissions. All too often though I find renewable advocates such as yourself forgetting what the question was and latching onto one particular solution. "I don't care what the question was, I forgot the question, but the answer is definitely more wind & solar!" And then when I show them that France has effectively and successfully decarbonized its electrical production 20 years ago by going for nuclear in a big way (CO2 per capita today at ~1/10 of Germany despite using ~5% more per person), they usually stick their fingers in their ears and go "lalala".
We talk about feeding excess wind energy as H2 into the natural gas grid.
You assume that the same amount of energy put into the gas grid will be drawn from the gas grid again, which is not the case.
No, I assume the same amount of energy for heat will be consumed, regardless of which source it comes from. I've shown to you that at 5% concentrations, you will at best offset ~1% of CH4 use, and thus achieve an emissions reduction from its use of at best ~1%. I did assume the H2 production is zero-CO2. It's just simple thermodynamics. Volumetrically H2 has lower energy content, which has the effect of lowering the energy content of the overall mixture, thus in order to achieve equal energy output, you'll need to burn more of the mixture. Here's the math (check me please):
let us assume 25 MPa nominal gas pressure
let E_total be the total amount of heat energy required
let V_total be the total amount of pipeline gas consumed
let ED be the energy density (energy per volume at nominal gas pressure) of the gas when combusted.
V_total = E_total / ED
The value of ED above depends on the molecular composition of the pipeline gas. If you look here, you'll see 100% NG gives 9 MJ/L, whereas H2 only gives ~2 MJ/L.
Hence a pipeline gas composed of 100% NG at 25 MPa has an ED_ng = 9 MJ/L, and pipeline gas composed of 5% H2 and 95% NG at 25 MPa has a ED_mix = 8.65 MJ/L.
Since E_total is assumed in both cases to be equal to produce a direct comparison of gas consumption, the change is in V_total:
V_total_mix = E_total / ED_mix
V_total_ng = E_total / ED_ng
Given that ED_mix = (8.65 / 9) x ED_ng = 0.96111 x ED_ng we get:
V_total_mix = E_total / (0.96111 x ED_ng)
Rearranging the coefficient of the density term we see that:
1.0404 x V_total_mix = E_total / ED_ng
Substituting V_total_ng for the right-hand side we get the ultimate result:
1.0404 x V_total_mix = V_total_ng
Hence, it takes ~4.04% extra pipeline gas composed of a 5/95 H2/NG mixture to provide the same total amount of energy of a pipeline gas composed of 100% NG. But since the mixed pipeline gas is still composed of 95% NG, we have effectively consumed 0.95 x 1.0404 = 98.84% or roughly 99% of the original volume of NG. Thus, a 5% concentration of H2 in the pipeline has offset only ~1% of NG consumption and CO2 emissions.
What's worse is if the gas gets then used for electricity production in, say, a CCGT. Since your typical electrolysis rig is only ~50% efficient, and current state of the art CCGTs are up to 60% efficient, this is kind of pipeline-stuffing of H2 generated from wind power represents at least a good 70% energy loss of surplus production. In fact it could be a lot more, since gas backup peakers are often OCGT (CCGT have around 40-60 minute startup times, so they're not good for backing up gusting wind) with at best ~30% efficiency, so perhaps even more than 85% losses. An alternative would be to run-up the CCGT ahead of time prior to your forecasting predicting a lull and quickly disconnecting during a gust, but this means that some of the time the turbine will be in spinning reserve and burning unused gas, which will lower its efficiency, so a quick set of my pants estimate would be about 75% losses from the turbine blades to electrons flowing onto the grid a few hours later.
At this point you have to just be honest and considering that only a very small concentration of H2 is allowable in the gas grid, the expenses of operating a gas plant intermittently and the associated wear & tear and maintenance and the 75% energy loss due to intermittency; and conclude that it's either pumped hydro (25% losses, no excess wear & tear from intermittent running, but much more expensive to buy and site) or building a generator that is dispatchable, baseload capable and zero-CO2 (this would be your nuclear, biomass & hydro dams) and using intermittent sources like wind only as a supplemental technology to capture the peaks when possible - and this is exactly what I advocate for.
Hence your concerns about leakage or britteling is not relevant.
H2 will not sit and only start to embrittle metals or bearings after some time. It will start diffusing into the metal right away. Now of course damage depends on exposure length, but if used at scale, there's always going to be some of it present, hence the danger. Below a few percent you could mix anything into the gas grid and have it work fine. But the question is at-scale production.
Here's a thought experiment: looking here, if we estimate about ~1GW of surplus wind power for 8 hours (easily achievable with the fluctuations, in fact 10x this would be quite normal), you'll need on the order of 12000m^3 of pipe volume for the pure hydrogen at 25 MPa, or about 61km of pipe at 0.5m inner diameter. Now if you don't want to exceed 5% concentration in the network, that means you need ~1220km of piping of that diameter.
But that's just to give you a taste of the piping scale. The real problems start when you look at where this gets us in terms of real CO2 offsetting. Since at identical pressure methane has 4.5x the energy content per unit of volume than hydrogen does, that means that in order to keep concentration below 5%, you'll still be using about 99% natural gas for heating energy (and this ratio cannot improve - it is dictated by the maximum concentration of H2 vs CH4 and their energy content by volume). Even if half of the gas in the mix were molecular H2, you'd only be getting 10% of the energy from it, so you'd only offset 10% of the CO2 emissions from natural gas use.
Put simply, I have to concur with Elon Musk here, H2 is great for upper stages of rockets, but it's a dog almost anywhere else (loosely paraphrased, he was talking about liquid H2 use for transportation, but the problems apply roughly equally badly to home heating).
The win / win situation is that I can use the existing storage of the gas grid (CH4 storage) and can support the grid with H2.
Up to a few percent perhaps, which is almost certainly not going to be enough to do much of a difference (see back of the napkin calculation above). At best it might offset your intermittency economics by a few percent - not exactly a huge change. As for CO2 emissions offsetting, it's utterly inconsequential.
No it is not:) as the H2 is piped into the lowest pressure levels, it never gets liquified or is mixed with gas that is supposed to be liquified.
Right, so it's not usable for liquefaction and transportation use (horrible in ICB vehicles and a less so in fuel cell vehicles). I was using that only as an illustration of what might happen if you tried to do it.
Like I said already, I do not refer to articles, but to the original plans of the Chinese operator and the contractors at the time of the start of the construction.
I assume you've got access to some internal planning documents then? If not, then you've only got news articles and press releases, same as everybody else.
For some reason, you keep denying the fact that Tianshan was supposed to enter service in 2013 and believe that it is still 'on schedule' although it isn't.
Construction schedules cannot account for unplanned construction halts due to unforeseen government interference, simple as that. When that happens, you have to adjust your original estimate. They have been delayed due to government action for about a year. They're starting up about a year later. Period.
In other words, they won't be able to do it "on-time" and "on-budget" until "estimates stabilize". Like I said, if you accept that delays are a part of the schedule, you'll always be on schedule. This is not how schedules work, though.
Construction schedule is not a train schedule. There are error bars on all parts of it, hence why it's called an "estimate". On first-of-a-kind projects, the error bars are going to be large. Besides, even a train schedule has error bars below which a train is not considered to be late.
This is all just word games, really. Their construction process was on-time, they just got an unplanned interrupt. Frankly, I won't hold it against them, just as I don't hold bad weather conditions at sea (which are actually a lot more predictable than government action) against offshore wind projects. You do whatever you want.
Add to that construction costs decommissioning costs and nuclear fuel reprocessing / storage costs
Oh my, reading comprehension fail: "The NEI presented figures from the Electric Utility Cost Group on generating costs comprising fuel, capital and operating costs for 61 nuclear sites in 2012.". Fuel costs typically include a fee that is set aside for decommissioning & storage (at least they do in the US - that's what paid for Yucca Mountain), and "construction costs" are a subset of capital costs. So $44/MWh is indeed the full figure.
Why aren't there more nuclear fuel reprocessing plants? Because it's horrendously expensive.
Of course it's expensive and everybody knows it's expensive, because of the oxide fuel and the complexity of the aqueous process. The prospects of cheap reprocessing are by cheaper processes such as pyroprocessing, or even getting rid of it altogether (TWR). If you're hoping for me to take the side of PUREX, then you're wrong, I don't think it's a good process.
Cost of building maintaining, removing new Wind farms? Less than $36.5 per MWh
Care to actually quote how you derived this number from the linked report? It doesn't appear in there, so you must have arrived at it by some other means. The closest I could find is mentioned on page 55 where they quote operating costs of EDPR at around $24/kWh for US installations, which seems about right. This does not factor in capital costs, only operating ones ("supplies and services, which includes O&M costs ($14.7/MWh); personnel costs ($3.7/MWh); and other operating costs, which mainly includes operating taxes, leases, and rents ($5.2/MWh).") or site cleanup after decommissioning (by my guess it's going to be pretty low, but remains to be seen). It also depends on long-term dependability of the mechanics of the wind turbine, mainly the gearbox, which remains to be seen (there is some wonkiness there, but not much).
It also does not include any cost of intermittency, which is going to become significant above about 20-30% of supply (even in Germany wind & solar only account for ~15%, the rest being "hard" renewables like hydro (maxed out) and biomass (problems with land use due to energy crop farming)).
The costs of wind power have also already pretty much leveled out because scaled up component production has been implemented and there's few learning curve benefits to be reaped going forward. A wind turbine is a dead simple system that hasn't substantially changed in 20-30 years. I happen to think that there is good reason to believe current wind turbine designs won't scale well beyond ~10MW because of a simple square-cube law that dictates that for every doubling of rotor diameter, you get a quadrupling of power produced (that's your income) and an octupling of the torque on the gearbox (that's your cost) - heavier gearbox, heavier dome, heavier tower, costlier tower. Moreover, increasing wages are also going to limit the reduction potential. Wind turbines are simply enormously labor intensive, so at some point, the cost of labor is going start to drive the cost of the system. In fact, the report you linked seems to show indications of this when you look at the graph on page 49 for years 2004 - 2009. I don't think all of that growth was natural, certainly there was room to combat it via some larger turbines with better $/kW economies, however, at least to some degree, labor costs were driving that, and they'll begin to do so again once wages in the US start to pick up again. Only time will tell, though.
With the numerous ways of matching and storing wind energy
As I said above, you're wrong to think Chinese don't do things on-time and on-budget.
No, all it says is that the articles you linked had the wrong estimate in them. I think it was more of a fluff info piece to make them look good in the media.
as they can't even make proper estimates
You try to make it seem like they were pumping these reactors out by the dozens and got all of it wrong. The reactor was completely new with not a single unit completed at the time construction started, so it was a rough estimate at best. Areva themselves were still learning on the construction side of the EPR design. Once they have a few units built, you'll see the estimates stabilize.
I don't want to contemplate how safe their plants will end up being
Go ahead, contemplate. EDF has a 30% stake in the plant and they too are on the hook for any operational trouble, so you can be pretty sure they're watching the project with a microscope.
Interesting, though it confirms my suspicion that we're talking about a few percent at most - only then *perhaps* it's doable. But anything more significant and you'll damage your gas network. H2 has very different material and mechanical properties for which the CH4 network was not designed. I'm not even sure what they're doing now won't do damage in the future - H2 has a tendency to embrittle and seep out of steel pipes and it eats through seals like crazy. And you can also forget about liquefaction for use in transport and such like, CH4 and H2 liquify under vastly different conditions - my guess is after liquefaction of CH4 the still gaseous molecular H2 is simply allowed to escape.
And articles in german aren't a problem for me, don't worry.
Except that for one thing, "on budget" required the Canadian taxpayer to provide China with over $1.5 billion in interest-free loans.
This is actually pretty common practice on large-scale projects that are going to benefit the local economy. The US, for example, gives out billions of dollars yearly in low-interest loans so that foreign entities purchase US-made goods (see http://www.exim.gov/). Canada might have considered its sale to China to be of such strategic importance that it even went for an interest-free loan. So don't try and portray it as "the Canadian taxpayer" not getting their money's worth - overall, the Canadian economy most probably benefitted from it and that might warrant some investment from the exporting country.
Why we should need to do that, when China has all of our money already from all of us buying Salad Shooters, is open to interpretation. That interpretation is "we paid them to take this white elephant off our hands".
I love it how from a flawed premise ("China has all our money from exports, so why are we paying them!") come to a completely bogus conclusion ("they took it off our hands"). FYI, China had a bidding process where nuclear power construction companies submitted bids and China negotiated and picked the ones that looked best to it and if the Canadian government got involved and sweetened the deal to get some benefit back to Canadian industry, then that's a good thing - it's capitalism at work. Just because some portions of the Chinese manufacturing and export industry have high income from export, doesn't mean other parts of the Chinese economy needs to overpay for imported goods.
Oh, and then there's the part where we leased them the heavy water basically for free, instead of selling it which would have broken the budget ($200/kg, 1,000,000 kg required).
Can you get the actual value for the lease? I found the same Sierra Club article you probably got your figure from and it doesn't mention it. Besides a "basically for free" lease isn't entirely free, so overall it might be just another way to sweeten the deal to get a sale and extract value down the line.
And why would the Canadian government need to second-guess the environmental assessment of a construction site in China? It's the Chinese government's job.
I don't have the time to fact-check everything you say, but overall you seem extremely unhappy about a deal that's pretty standard, even beneficial to the Canadian economy. Could the Canadian government have gotten a better deal? Maybe. But to cry foul over what are in effect trivial problems seems nonsensical to me.
Original Taishan NPP plan schedule called for entering commercial service in 2013, full stop.
Then that estimate was quite simply wrong. There's no way in hell that October 2009 + 4 years means you start commercial service in 2013. My guess is it was a neat little fairy tale told to reporters to keep up a nice face, while the project managers knew well that 2014 was more probable.
Yes, if you don't consider the delays, any project will be 'roughly on schedule'.
You can't honestly say that externally imposed unscheduled delays are to be blamed on the project's management. For example, blaming bad weather for not making your offshore wind farm construction schedules. Large projects can have unforeseen complications and first of their kind projects especially so. Cut the guys some slack, both the nuclear and wind ones, they've got a tough job. Design and manufacturing faults, though, (also mentioned in the linked article) are correct to blame on the project.
Depends on type, project and installation. The utilities building them seem quite content to keep going, as they see them being competitive with current baseload sources.
Thorium nuclear generated electricity is even more expensive due to the reactor design needing to be more robust.
Actually, in most Thorium molten-salt designs, the reactor is a lot less robust (in terms of raw materials, at least), because molten-salt isn't pressurized, so there's no need for a big heavy pressure vessel and an enormous containment building around it. But it really depends on the exact design you are talking about - perhaps clarify and we can have a more informed discussion. In any case, I'd contend your blanket statement of "Thorium nuclear generated electricity is even more expensive". That claim requires access to broad knowledge of the cost structure of Thorium power reactor designs and as far as I know, those aren't available yet.
Citation needed, the articles I've read claimed $1000 to $2000 per kilo.
You are correct, *at present* it is indeed pretty high (which would mean we'd just favor mining). The cost reduction into the $300/kg category would require some advances in the material properties of the absorbent used: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi...
So consider ~$1500/kg the top-end estimate should uranium mining become completely unviable (we've again got thousands upon thousands of years of mineable Uranium at $500/kg, so I'm hopeful the absorbent properties can be sorted by then; or indeed we might finally crack fusion - that'd be the coolest of all prospects). In any case, thanks for the heads up on the present-day costs.
If these new designs are so great then why does the nuclear industry keep going with the old designs?
A few points to this:
1) Give them some time, they are slowly coming along. Anything nuclear is needs to be approached very carefully. If all goes well, we should see the pilot plants coming online in the early 2020s.
2) By and large the new nuclear construction projects are building Gen III units such as the AP1000, EPR, ABWR and VVER-1200, all of which have much improved on the light-water concept (though they aren't strictly revolutionary - well, perhaps the AP1000 is a bit closer to being a significant departure).
3) There is, in fact, one pilot Gen IV plant already built and about to be commissioned (the Beloyarsk 4 unit), running a BN-800 reactor, a pool-type liquid sodium-cooled fast breeder. I don't think it's the best design, but it's a step in the right direction. It will be a proving ground and a learning platform for their mass-production units (BN-1200). We'll have to wait and see.
Fukushima put quite a kink in any new construction in China, as there was a construction approval halt for near-sea reactors from April to at least October in 2011 (and Taishan is what you might call close to the sea) - half a year delay can easily get you some delay in onlining. You also need to keep in mind that 46 months was the planned construction time, not when it enters commercial service. With first concrete being poured in October 2009, construction should have been complete in about autumn 2013, but adding the half- to one-year delay due to Fukushima, we'd expect it to complete construction some time in 2014. And according to the WNN article I linked, startup should indeed happen this year and commissioning into commercial service, next year (you need to train people, run safety drills, test out all the maintenance and refueling equipment and failsafes, etc. - that takes some time after construction).
So if you consider the ripple that Fukushima sent into the world of nuclear reactor construction projects, Taishan is indeed roughly on schedule. I guess if you wanted to split hairs and talk about plus or minus a few months, sure, but I don't see it as much of a problem, especially when you compare it to the monumental management disaster that is Olkiluoto 3.
ISTM that Homo economicus is almost incapable of resisting the urge to cut corners in the design, construction, operation, and inspection of nuclear power plants. (And in non-nuclear projects as well, though few have the destructive potential of Cherynobyl.)
Which is why we need a strong state-sponsored regulatory body which keeps the industry in check. There is of course a balance to be struck between overregulation and letting the industry run wild, where we encourage societal progress while keeping whacky ideas at bay. Most of all, we need a good open and transparent process. And finally we should help the population maintain a level-headed approach to danger assessment. Radiation is nothing to mess with for sure, but the actual destructive impact of even extremely messed up situations (such as Chernobyl) is vastly overblown by quite unfounded fears. By the logic that people will cut corners to save a buck we shouldn't be building hydroelectricity, since every so often a dam bursts and drowns people, or some piping failure kills them or the water flow destroys large tracts of land.
And with the past few decades' huge increase in pressure to cut corners in order to maximize short-term profit, I suspect things will get worse before they get better.
Not necessarily, as modern digital simulation and modeling technology allows us to see in exquisite detail what reactor designers of old could only guess at. For all intents and purposes, it is night and day different and has the potential to transform the nuclear industry same as any other it has touched.
As for the Chinese... have they hit on a better approach than capitalism, or are they practicing the Soviet-style corner-cutting that gave us Chernyobyl?
No, but they have very strict project and schedule control and the can-do spirit that we've lost in the hippie 70s, which is why they're able to execute on the project much more efficiently. As for your insinuation that they might be doing "Soviet-style corner-cutting", the project at Taishan is 30% co-owned by Électricité de France, which is acutely aware that problems in China will cast a very negative light on them back home.
This is quite not true. Resource availability is largely dictated by the price you're willing to pay for it - in typical scenarios a doubling of the price expands viable resources 10-fold. Moreover, even today's reactors are "breeders" in a sense, they just don't make 100% of their fuel (breeding ratio is typically somewhere around 0.3). There are some quite interesting businesses working towards "converter" or "burner" molten-salt reactors based on a combined thorium/uranium cycle which trades the breeding ratio for a massively simplified core design, single-fluid approach (plumbing problem gone), no need for in-line salt reprocessing (no more complex in-situ nuclear chemistry) and much better proliferation resistance (since it's running on LEU with no Pa separation). It also maintains the most attractive aspects of molten-salt, such as very high burnup, high temperature, a compact core, full passive safety, FP off-gassing and no need for fuel fabrication. You do need to periodically add in some 20% LEU fissile makeup to compensate for the '< 1' breeding ratio (<5% LEU when running with no Thorium), but it's still about 6x less than conventional light-water and the simplifications in the design are enormous. The design's main proponent, David LeBlanc, estimates that such a reactor would have fuel costs on the order of $0.1c/kWh and that even if the price of Uranium rose to $500/kg (4-5x what it's now), it'd still only be $0.2c/kWh and at that price we'd have essentially unlimited Uranium supplies (the world's oceans contain thousands upon thousands of years worth of Uranium recoverable at only $300-$400/kg).
Honestly, this is the worst defeatist attitude I can imagine. "We are bad at building stuff, so we shouldn't build stuff." How come the Chinese are building these very same reactors on-time and on-budget? We in the west need to get off our collective lazy asses and start making stuff with our hands again.
Feeding H2 created by electrolysis into the gas grid and using a gas turbine connected to the gas grid during high demand.
Can you quote some references for this? Because I'm kinda skeptical they're "feeding H2... into the gas grid". They might feed methane after combining the H2 with a source of carbon to create CH4, losing at least 50% of the input energy in the process (and another 25% after combustion in a CCGT, or more in an OCGT), plus needing a carbon sources (typically biomass, but can be CCS). But as for molecular H2 in a natural gas pipe... no chance.
Unless you happen to be identifying an actual shill.
No, it is still the lowest forms of argumentation, not because of the factuality of the ties of a speaker with the technology or industry they are defending, but because they attack the speaker instead of the arguments they present - it's a form of ad-hominem attack. Kinda like saying that Christian apologetics is invalid because those presenting the arguments are typically Christian themselves (they might even be pastors - oh noes!). To accuse them of "shilling for their religion" would be dumb and immediately discarded as a tactic of character assassination, of trying to dodge the argument itself.
Oh and after some more googling I found that his son's statements have been corroborated by other people in Strauss' senior's circle and by independent events (such as him heading the US fusion power research program): http://www.dailykos.com/story/...
In any case, whatever he meant, it was a rhetoric statement, torn completely out of context and expressing a personal sentiment, not the official stance of the atomic energy program. So the more one relies on hyping this quote mine, the more it is shown that the speaker is unable to come up with actual, factual arguments to support their position.
Slashdot Mirror
a gas pipeline NO, that is already existing, that is the point.
Oh yes, my friend, you need to build it to your H2 generator rig and maintain it. You'll need a pressurization substation and an industrial connector. You'll also need to pay for maintaining the existing grid.
and a gas plant. NO, that is already existing, that is the point.
Again, you're wrong here. For one, Germany has a very small amount of these, only about 10% of electricity is provided by gas. Seeing as 2/3 of your power would need to be pushed into H2 and subsequently into a gas plant, you'll be deriving ~67% of your overall power generation from gas plants (regardless if burning NG or H2 or pixie dust). So who's going to build those extra 57% worth of capacity? Somebody who expects to make a profit from it, be it an independent utility, or the wind farm operator. If it's the former, they'll be buying your 5%H2-laced gas (let's call it "shitgas" for reasons I'll explain later) at market prices and those are pretty darn low and selling the generated electricity on to the consumer.
The economical calculation for that is pretty simple:
It cost the wind farm X to produce 1 Joule of electrical energy.
They'll convert that 1 Joule of electrical energy and generate a given amount of hydrogen at efficiency Y, which means upon combustion of the generated hydrogen, you get "1 Joule x Z" back AS HEAT ENEGY.
The gas plant takes the heat energy and converts it back to electrical energy at efficiency Z (60% for CCGT, 29% for OCGT) and sell it on to the power grid.
Thus, your original production cost to create Joule of energy is X' = X / (Y x Z). If Y=0.75 (best currently available electrolysis rigs at lab scale) and Z = 0.6 (best currently available CCGT plants), you get 2.22x multiplication of your original production costs (what it costs to provide 1 Joule TO THE GRID). If you take a more realistic Y=0.5 and Z = 0.5 (due to intermittent running), you get a 4x multiplication of your production costs. So effectively, the wind farm is forced to sell its generated electricity (as H2) at a 2-4x higher price in order to maintain the same level of profitability.
No, the loss is max 20% when H2 is generated
Please do point me to that miracle grid-scale electrolysis rig, I must have missed it.
the H2 is piped into an EXISTING gas grid, CONSUMED IMMEDIATELY (more or less) in gas ovens used for heating and cooking, so the total amount of H2 gas produced is only limited by the current consumption.
Except you forgot that you can at best get a 1% contribution to your energy generation from burning this gas for heating. Heating, however, consumes only about 2-3x as much energy as electrical generation, so even assuming you took all of your surplus electricity (roughly 2/3 with wind) and transferred it into the heat market, you'd essentially be trying to supply ~20-25% of the heating energy from H2, which you simply can't. As we've established, your carbon-free energy contribution to heating tops out at 1-2%. IOW, even if you could convert all of your surplus electrical power into H2 for heating at no extra cost, 90% of your surplus power generation would still be inadmissible into the gas grid.
You simply forget that (after I pointed out that many of your assumptions are wrong) that ROIs are not that relevant when you are working at plans and projects that change the world and take decades to finish.
So you believe in free lunches. Okay, I think I'm done here :D Maybe next time try and ask be baker for free bread, the bus for a free ride and the local utility company for free power and see how that goes for you.
It boggles the mind that you can say "dick all would have happened (and that's mostly what did happen" regarding Fukushima. It's clear that the vast majority of the population of japan do not agree with you.
And 78% of the US population believes in angels. Popular vote does not determine reality. Moreover, your reading comprehension needs work again, as had you not cut my sentence off there and torn it out of context, you'd see that I was comparing it to the tsunami that drowned nearly 20000 people.
It is estimated that, assuming linear dose response, ultimately ~200 excess cancer deaths will result from Fukushima over the coming years, most of them in Japan. Are those inconsequential? Of course not. But keep it in context - on that day alone 20000 people drowned, millions have been displaced, their homes gone and vast tracts of shoreline and coastal cities and associated infrastructure have been utterly destroyed. If you look at it honestly, you have to conclude that living in a coastal city in Japan is vastly more dangerous than the occasional nuclear accident. But people aren't rational beings and the media know fear sells news, so guess which story you heard on TV?
Nuclear can do no wrong in your eyes. Are you aware that Fukushima is leaking at least 400 tonnes of highly radioactive water every day and it could be over 1000 tonnes a day, the ice wall the tried failed.
Care to elaborate on what "highly radioactive" is? We have ways to measure that. Also, where did you get that crazy figure. I couldn't find it anywhere on any reputable news source, only on some fear mongering blogs. Besides, while certainly not something to be dismissed as inconsequential, leaks of this nature into the ocean get diluted down beyond background levels pretty quickly.
Anyways, stop frequenting crazy conspiracy blogs and listening to professional nutjobs like Helen Caldicott or Arnie Gundersen, it'll rot your mind. Read some research on radiation effects and you'll see that it's far less problematic in the big picture than the media would like to make you believe.
(3c for wind because current PPAs are averaging 2.5c and the subsidy is 2.2c for the first ten years)
You're comparing current electricity sales prices for wind with LCOE for new nuclear power plants. Good job on comparing apples to oranges.
Hoover dam capacity: 352,000km3
Uh oh, massive reading fail on your part. The Wikipedia page actually says "28,537,000 acreft (35.200 km3)" - that's thirty-five-point-two cubic kilometers, so right out of the door you're wrong by 4 orders of magnitude - quite an achievement, and it only gets worse from here. In order to be able to use, say, 10% of the reservoir's capacity for energy storage (which is a big ask, considering it's been at ~2/3 capacity since the 90s due to droughts and extensive water use by the population), you need another reservoir (or set of reservoirs) of at least 10% the volume at a suitable lower position close to the dam. The nearest possible suitable reservoir is lake Mohave, unfortunately it's 50km downstream, so that ain't gonna happen. But let's imagine you find some way to blast the mountains right beyond the dam apart to create a nice little reservoir at 100m height difference (the dam itself is ~200m tall, but the water reaches all the way to its bottom and it's not always full, so we'll split the baby and use 100m average water height to simplify the calculation). So how much does that give you?
3.5 x 10^9 m^3 x 100m x 9.81m/s^2 x 0.75 (roundtrip efficiency) ~= 2.575 TWh
That'll give you the power to back up the US power supply for around 4 hours, or countries the size of Germany for about 2 days. Your goal is ~14 days, so you're still about an order of magnitude short. And that's using the largest water reservoir in America.
Dinorwig
So if Uranium is 10% of TCO and reprocessed Uranium costs over 10x as much then nuclear would end up costing well over 20c per kWh would it not.
Not necessarily. Fuel costs consist of several components, for Uranium it's mining, refining (yellowcake production), enrichment and fuel fabrication. It depends on the breakdown and efficiency of use that dictates price contribution to operation, so it'd probably far less (I've heard estimates where a 5x price hike on raw uranium would only result in about a 2x bump on the fuel price). What you also neglected to consider is that at around 3-5x current mining price, we'd probably have tens of thousands of viable reserves, so the 10x is quite a high margin. Lastly there's the usage efficiency. The LWR once-through cycle is pretty inefficient. With higher burnup or higher breeding ratios (all reactors breed some fuel, just typical LWRs don't do it much), all of which are achievable in modern reactors, the cost goes down. Or we could use fast breeders for which the only cost is the initial fissile load - after that they run on depleted uranium, of which there is a heck of a lot (100x more than fissile).
Sooner or later we will have to go 100% renewable, why wait, why not invest in renewables whilst is easy to do, if we leave it until it's too late the shit will hit the fan.
Well, the "sooner or later" might in fact be quite a ways away. Regardless, I broadly agree with you, but there's no need to rush things or exclude one path over another. I'd like to see us invest in anything and everything that reduces CO2 emissions - that's the real pressing issue - be it renewables, nuclear, carbon sequestration or burning dung for power, for that matter. R&D being currently invested in all of these is currently peanuts.
Nuclear power is a short term solution which causes long term problems.
It doesn't have to. We have ways to burn down the waste to short-term stuff. We just have to use it.
If humans were capable of handling nuclear power without cocking it up regularly then I would support it, but they are not.
That's a bit of a pessimistic way to look at it. We've had a pretty good half century, generated shitloads of zero-CO2 energy with it and only managed to cock it up a few times (and while each of these was serious, they pale in comparison to the number of deaths you see in, say, transportation, every year). Don't you not think the cavemen that discovered fire have not burned themselves quite often and wanted to throw away that dangerous thing? But their curiosity prevailed and we today couldn't imagine life without it. "Nuclear fire" is kinda similar, we're new to it (we didn't even know atoms could fission before 1938 - the TV is older than that), learning and making mistakes, but ultimately I'm an optimist and largely believe in the ingenuity of humanity to master a wonderful new power source and use it for good.
Either we shut down the wind plant and store nothing.
Right, that's forgone revenue.
Or we use the wind plants excess energy to create H2. Obviously after we have created H2 we can burn it in a gas turbine or a simple 'car engine'.
So you take your invested $ to generate this power, divide it by the efficiency of your H2 generation rig, and that's what you get back. Oh and you also just expanded your capital costs by the cost of an industrial-sized H2 generator, a gas pipeline and a gas plant.
Again: wind surplus, use it to create H2 or lose it.
Gas grid: use it to distribute the H2 or lose it.
Gas turbine: use the grid or lose it.
See, you understand how forgone revenue works. Instead of losing all of the power from curtailed wind turbines, you only lose ~3/4 of it by using the energy -> H2 -> energy conversion method, in effect increasing your cost to produce it by a factor of 4. And you add capital costs for an H2 generation rig and gas grid and gas plant operations. Also, selling into the gas market means you're competing with the NG providers, so you'll be selling at whatever they're selling at (and they tend to sell _really_ cheap).
Bottom line the wind plant only makes normal gas less CO2 heavy
Wow, that 1% reduction is really going to save the planet. Remember, you're limited by a volumetric concentration of 5%.
The circumstances where you really use the gas grid to produce electric power are rare, as you have ordinary power plants to do that.
So what's worse is you're just selling a natural gas substitute produced at massive expense :D
So bottom line it is a win that 'cost nothing' regardless of your 'efficiency' calculations.
Whoa now young man, that's a bold statement. I suppose you're not familiar with the acronyms ROI (return on investment) and O&M (operations and maintenance), but in the world of actual projects that cost money to build and run, they reign supreme. Lost production for a wind farm is as serious as it is for anyone (your investors expect a return and profit - try and tell them your ROI is maybe 3-4x as long as you had originally planned and they'll eat you alive).
Capital costs represent between 60 and 75 percent of the cost of a nuclear plant
You know that sounds about right. If we take the high estimate (75%) to be for a reactor operating for a relatively short 40 years at a cap factor of 0.8, a 1 GW unit with a levelized purchase price of $9 billion would cost $32/MWh, so adjusted to 100% this comes to roughly $42/MWh. The remaining 25% is fuel, O&M and decommissioning costs. Of course this significantly depends on what deal you get on the unit and unfortunately real reactor purchase prices are a closely guarded secret of the manufacturers. Prices can range from the sensible (Unit 1 costing about $3B in inflation-adjusted present day dollars and Units 2&3 being constructed for about $4.5B a pop) all the way to the downright insane (honestly the idiots who approved this project ought to have their heads examined, if AP1000s can be had in the US for over twice as cheap, as can be VVER-1200s and ABWRs).
Re Nuclear capital costs, the simple fact is US nuclear plants capital costs are already paid.
In 25 years the energy from Wind and solar being installed today will likely be a lot cheaper than 44 per MWh. (Turbines are expected to last over 40 years, solar PV loses about 12-20% of it's efficiency over 25 years.)
Well, that remains to be seen. Current wind installation prices are getting close to leveling out. The future will show more.
no doubt they are leaving costs out. Every other site states nuclear costs about 10c/kWh.
The $44/MWh is for existing operating plants, whereas $10c/kWh is for new builds and takes into account things such as uncertainties in licensing, delays and a host of other potentialities for cost-rising elements. Financial prognosis is a black art.
In the UK the govt are offering EDF over 15c for every kWh.
I agree that Hinkley Point C should have been sent down the drain, the single most expensive power plant on the face of planet. For that matter, Areva's EPR is turning out to be a massively overpriced unit, at least the way it's being built outside of China. My guess is they're probably trying to save Areva from the massively overpriced fiasco that is Olkilouto 3 (the cost overruns there are largely being absorbed by Areva), in order to preserve what little nuclear industry is left in Europe. Don't know the details of the deal, but personally I'd tear the idiots at Areva a new one.
The Govt site states current wind energy here costs 5 to 6.6c per kWh.
That's because it doesn't include the cost of providing zero-CO2 storage and current investment confidence is high. Add the storage and Hinkley Point C will seem cheap. Of course that cost doesn't materialize until wind gets fairly high in the generator percentages, so it'll take a while for it to materialize.
How many more Hanfords, Fukushimas and Chernobyls are there going to be be we realise we are no good at managing nuclear power?
Hanford was a military weapons production installation, not a power plant. Don't be dishonest in including it in these. ;)
As for Fukushima - we'll see how new plant designs do. Had they been running an ABWR or even an AP1000 at Fukushima, dick all would have happened (and that's mostly what did happen, but thanks to mass hysteria it got blown wildly out of proportion; never mind the 20000 tsunami-drowned suckers, NUCULAR ACCIDENT!!111!). Oh and Chernobyl was just a criminally bad design in an almost completely unregulated and curtained state-controlled industry. By that logic you could try and paint the nuclear power industry with the legacy of nuclear weapons. Oh wait, you already did (Hanford). Well, never mind then.
No, like Hydro, pumped hydro, wave power, tidal schemes, solar thermal, solar PV, compressed air storage, biowaste energy, battery storage etc.
Hydro: already maxed out in the west. Pumped hydro: calculate the scale involved, it ain't pretty. Wave power is so expensive it's not funny, as is solar thermal. Solar PV is intermittent - see linked graph again, it won't cut it. CAES has some potential, but is as yet much more expensive than pumped hydro. Biowaste accounts for a drop in the bucket - there's simply not enough of it. Batteries are horribly expensive at grid scale and environmentally very damaging (Ever seen a lithium mine? Or maybe you prefer lead-acid? And Vanadium redox is still more expensive than pumped hydro). You forgot to mention flywheels.
The point is, you need to understand the problem quantitatively. Run some calculations on the system cost and scale and post them - it's a sobering experience. And don't forget to include the developing world, they want power too, you know.
Cheap gas and oil won't be around for long, coal is the only real fossil fuel problem.
So CO2 emissions from gas and fracking are a-OK? You do realize that natural gas still emits around 50% of the CO2 per unit of energy, not to mention that any small methane leak is also a serious source of GHGs, right?
There is currently enough Uranium reserve to continue to power the nuclear industry at it 10% of global energy rate for 200 years. So if every country were to go nuclear like France, how long would that last?
This is grossly oversimplifying. First you need to understand the relationship between cost and recoverable resources. In general, double the cost, you increase recoverable resources 10-fold. Even using today's nuclear power designs (which I'm not a big fan of, but consider them a necessary evil on the way to better designs), the fuel cost is only about 10% of the TCO of the plant (the rest being construction, O&M and decommissioning), so if you double their raw fuel cost, their LCOE grows only very modestly (a good chunk of their fuel cost is also enrichment and fabrication). So if you accept, say, a 5% increase in their LCOE, you'd have enough Uranium to power all of the world for another 200-300 years. Now you might say that's not enough for fusion to come along, so read on. :D), use a mix of nuclear, hydro and whatever else you can lay your hands on.
The real prospect, is for new reactor designs that either breed fuel from fertile uranium (of which there is approx. 100x as much as directly fissile uranium) or use the existing stock a lot more efficient (e.g. the denatured molten-salt, not a breeder, but a lot simpler than the LFTR being hyped around the net). Breeders are not paper reactors, they exist and are operating. They have their challenges, but give a significant improvement. The molten-salt ones pile a bunch of very attractive safety on top.
Should we *only* do nuclear and not invest in renewables like wind, solar, geothermal and tidal? Absolutely not! We should do all of these! Use what's appropriate where it's appropriate. Iceland is a geothermal bomb, so nuclear there is stupid. Arizona has lots of solar, with a little improvement in salt storage, that could pan out. And where nothing else works really exceptionally well (like central Europe
It is a financial storage.
I do understand that, but it's financial storage that loses around 3/4 of your stored product. That means that whatever power you time shift will come out around 4x as expensive. For example, say you are running a 100% wind-based grid (it's a little more complicated, but just for simplicity's sake). Since wind has around 1/3 cap factor (actually around 25% in Germany, but whatever), that means you need to overbuild by about a factor 3x in terms of MW installed relative to the average MW of consumption. That means about 2/3 of your produced energy will come from times when there's too much of it (i.e. you need to store it). Now if your wind plant has a cost of producing a unit of energy of $X/kWh (this is referred to as LCOE), then only 1/3 of that value can be directly fed into the grid at any one time and on average 2/3 of it you need to time-shift. Given that the time-shifting technology inflates the cost of the production 4-fold, it means that your LCOE is in fact 3x higher than if you didn't have to do the time-shifting in the first place. *That's* the hidden cost of intermittency and that's assuming the time-shifting system is free (i.e. doesn't cost anything to build & maintain). Add that to the equation and it starts to look like a pretty bleak proposition.
This problem starts to occur in general (not just specific to H2-production) once intermittent sources hit a market penetration about equal to their capacity factor. This is not the case in Germany yet, but it's starting to become one. They're at ~15% now (rest being hydro & biomass), but once they get to around say 20-25%, you'll start seeing the weeping and gnashing of teeth as grid operators will start to curtail intermittent generators - after that, they'll be either forced to discard unrealized production (in economics this is a loss called "foregone earnings"), or forced to pay for its time-shifting. In short, intermittent renewables get cheaper with volume only up to a point, after which the problem of their intermittency slowly grows until it becomes overwhelming.
Now this is only a simplified model, but it gives you an idea of the mechanics at play here.
at a loss of roughly 50% due to electrolysis [the actual loss is less then 20%, I don't get where this /. myth comes from that electrolysis is inefficient
Well, it depends on the exact technology used. The most efficient numbers you quote are high-temp electrolyzers, but they require a readily available heat source (not the case for wind farms, unless you heat it with electricity, which diminishes efficiency again, or use NG heating, which makes it not zero-CO2). The really cheap ones use inefficient electrodes that degrade. The 50% number is a rough ballpark estimate of what can be achieved with sort of run of the mill readily available large-scale equipment.
So again: we don't talk about CO2
And that's one of the fundamental problems I find with discussing renewables with wind & solar proponents. Reducing CO2 has to be the first and primary goal, not installing tons of renewables. Installing renewables *might* be the answer to the task, but it has to always be moderated by the question of how to most efficiently reduce CO2 emissions. All too often though I find renewable advocates such as yourself forgetting what the question was and latching onto one particular solution. "I don't care what the question was, I forgot the question, but the answer is definitely more wind & solar!" And then when I show them that France has effectively and successfully decarbonized its electrical production 20 years ago by going for nuclear in a big way (CO2 per capita today at ~1/10 of Germany despite using ~5% more per person), they usually stick their fingers in their ears and go "lalala".
We talk about feeding excess wind energy as H2 into the natural gas grid.
And do you expect these wind guys
You assume that the same amount of energy put into the gas grid will be drawn from the gas grid again, which is not the case.
No, I assume the same amount of energy for heat will be consumed, regardless of which source it comes from. I've shown to you that at 5% concentrations, you will at best offset ~1% of CH4 use, and thus achieve an emissions reduction from its use of at best ~1%. I did assume the H2 production is zero-CO2. It's just simple thermodynamics. Volumetrically H2 has lower energy content, which has the effect of lowering the energy content of the overall mixture, thus in order to achieve equal energy output, you'll need to burn more of the mixture. Here's the math (check me please):
let us assume 25 MPa nominal gas pressure
let E_total be the total amount of heat energy required
let V_total be the total amount of pipeline gas consumed
let ED be the energy density (energy per volume at nominal gas pressure) of the gas when combusted.
V_total = E_total / ED
The value of ED above depends on the molecular composition of the pipeline gas. If you look here, you'll see 100% NG gives 9 MJ/L, whereas H2 only gives ~2 MJ/L.
Hence a pipeline gas composed of 100% NG at 25 MPa has an ED_ng = 9 MJ/L, and pipeline gas composed of 5% H2 and 95% NG at 25 MPa has a ED_mix = 8.65 MJ/L.
Since E_total is assumed in both cases to be equal to produce a direct comparison of gas consumption, the change is in V_total:
V_total_mix = E_total / ED_mix
V_total_ng = E_total / ED_ng
Given that ED_mix = (8.65 / 9) x ED_ng = 0.96111 x ED_ng we get:
V_total_mix = E_total / (0.96111 x ED_ng)
Rearranging the coefficient of the density term we see that:
1.0404 x V_total_mix = E_total / ED_ng
Substituting V_total_ng for the right-hand side we get the ultimate result:
1.0404 x V_total_mix = V_total_ng
Hence, it takes ~4.04% extra pipeline gas composed of a 5/95 H2/NG mixture to provide the same total amount of energy of a pipeline gas composed of 100% NG. But since the mixed pipeline gas is still composed of 95% NG, we have effectively consumed 0.95 x 1.0404 = 98.84% or roughly 99% of the original volume of NG. Thus, a 5% concentration of H2 in the pipeline has offset only ~1% of NG consumption and CO2 emissions.
What's worse is if the gas gets then used for electricity production in, say, a CCGT. Since your typical electrolysis rig is only ~50% efficient, and current state of the art CCGTs are up to 60% efficient, this is kind of pipeline-stuffing of H2 generated from wind power represents at least a good 70% energy loss of surplus production. In fact it could be a lot more, since gas backup peakers are often OCGT (CCGT have around 40-60 minute startup times, so they're not good for backing up gusting wind) with at best ~30% efficiency, so perhaps even more than 85% losses. An alternative would be to run-up the CCGT ahead of time prior to your forecasting predicting a lull and quickly disconnecting during a gust, but this means that some of the time the turbine will be in spinning reserve and burning unused gas, which will lower its efficiency, so a quick set of my pants estimate would be about 75% losses from the turbine blades to electrons flowing onto the grid a few hours later.
At this point you have to just be honest and considering that only a very small concentration of H2 is allowable in the gas grid, the expenses of operating a gas plant intermittently and the associated wear & tear and maintenance and the 75% energy loss due to intermittency; and conclude that it's either pumped hydro (25% losses, no excess wear & tear from intermittent running, but much more expensive to buy and site) or building a generator that is dispatchable, baseload capable and zero-CO2 (this would be your nuclear, biomass & hydro dams) and using intermittent sources like wind only as a supplemental technology to capture the peaks when possible - and this is exactly what I advocate for.
I misspoke in the earlier post when I said "metals or bearings", I meant "metals or seals". Sorry.
Hence your concerns about leakage or britteling is not relevant.
H2 will not sit and only start to embrittle metals or bearings after some time. It will start diffusing into the metal right away. Now of course damage depends on exposure length, but if used at scale, there's always going to be some of it present, hence the danger. Below a few percent you could mix anything into the gas grid and have it work fine. But the question is at-scale production.
Here's a thought experiment: looking here, if we estimate about ~1GW of surplus wind power for 8 hours (easily achievable with the fluctuations, in fact 10x this would be quite normal), you'll need on the order of 12000m^3 of pipe volume for the pure hydrogen at 25 MPa, or about 61km of pipe at 0.5m inner diameter. Now if you don't want to exceed 5% concentration in the network, that means you need ~1220km of piping of that diameter.
But that's just to give you a taste of the piping scale. The real problems start when you look at where this gets us in terms of real CO2 offsetting. Since at identical pressure methane has 4.5x the energy content per unit of volume than hydrogen does, that means that in order to keep concentration below 5%, you'll still be using about 99% natural gas for heating energy (and this ratio cannot improve - it is dictated by the maximum concentration of H2 vs CH4 and their energy content by volume). Even if half of the gas in the mix were molecular H2, you'd only be getting 10% of the energy from it, so you'd only offset 10% of the CO2 emissions from natural gas use.
Put simply, I have to concur with Elon Musk here, H2 is great for upper stages of rockets, but it's a dog almost anywhere else (loosely paraphrased, he was talking about liquid H2 use for transportation, but the problems apply roughly equally badly to home heating).
The win / win situation is that I can use the existing storage of the gas grid (CH4 storage) and can support the grid with H2.
Up to a few percent perhaps, which is almost certainly not going to be enough to do much of a difference (see back of the napkin calculation above). At best it might offset your intermittency economics by a few percent - not exactly a huge change. As for CO2 emissions offsetting, it's utterly inconsequential.
No it is not :) as the H2 is piped into the lowest pressure levels, it never gets liquified or is mixed with gas that is supposed to be liquified.
Right, so it's not usable for liquefaction and transportation use (horrible in ICB vehicles and a less so in fuel cell vehicles). I was using that only as an illustration of what might happen if you tried to do it.
Like I said already, I do not refer to articles, but to the original plans of the Chinese operator and the contractors at the time of the start of the construction.
I assume you've got access to some internal planning documents then? If not, then you've only got news articles and press releases, same as everybody else.
For some reason, you keep denying the fact that Tianshan was supposed to enter service in 2013 and believe that it is still 'on schedule' although it isn't.
Construction schedules cannot account for unplanned construction halts due to unforeseen government interference, simple as that. When that happens, you have to adjust your original estimate. They have been delayed due to government action for about a year. They're starting up about a year later. Period.
In other words, they won't be able to do it "on-time" and "on-budget" until "estimates stabilize". Like I said, if you accept that delays are a part of the schedule, you'll always be on schedule. This is not how schedules work, though.
Construction schedule is not a train schedule. There are error bars on all parts of it, hence why it's called an "estimate". On first-of-a-kind projects, the error bars are going to be large. Besides, even a train schedule has error bars below which a train is not considered to be late.
This is all just word games, really. Their construction process was on-time, they just got an unplanned interrupt. Frankly, I won't hold it against them, just as I don't hold bad weather conditions at sea (which are actually a lot more predictable than government action) against offshore wind projects. You do whatever you want.
Add to that construction costs decommissioning costs and nuclear fuel reprocessing / storage costs
Oh my, reading comprehension fail: "The NEI presented figures from the Electric Utility Cost Group on generating costs comprising fuel, capital and operating costs for 61 nuclear sites in 2012.". Fuel costs typically include a fee that is set aside for decommissioning & storage (at least they do in the US - that's what paid for Yucca Mountain), and "construction costs" are a subset of capital costs. So $44/MWh is indeed the full figure.
Why aren't there more nuclear fuel reprocessing plants? Because it's horrendously expensive.
Of course it's expensive and everybody knows it's expensive, because of the oxide fuel and the complexity of the aqueous process. The prospects of cheap reprocessing are by cheaper processes such as pyroprocessing, or even getting rid of it altogether (TWR). If you're hoping for me to take the side of PUREX, then you're wrong, I don't think it's a good process.
Cost of building maintaining, removing new Wind farms? Less than $36.5 per MWh
Care to actually quote how you derived this number from the linked report? It doesn't appear in there, so you must have arrived at it by some other means. The closest I could find is mentioned on page 55 where they quote operating costs of EDPR at around $24/kWh for US installations, which seems about right. This does not factor in capital costs, only operating ones ("supplies and services, which includes O&M costs ($14.7/MWh); personnel costs ($3.7/MWh); and other operating costs, which mainly includes operating taxes, leases, and rents ($5.2/MWh).") or site cleanup after decommissioning (by my guess it's going to be pretty low, but remains to be seen). It also depends on long-term dependability of the mechanics of the wind turbine, mainly the gearbox, which remains to be seen (there is some wonkiness there, but not much).
It also does not include any cost of intermittency, which is going to become significant above about 20-30% of supply (even in Germany wind & solar only account for ~15%, the rest being "hard" renewables like hydro (maxed out) and biomass (problems with land use due to energy crop farming)).
The costs of wind power have also already pretty much leveled out because scaled up component production has been implemented and there's few learning curve benefits to be reaped going forward. A wind turbine is a dead simple system that hasn't substantially changed in 20-30 years. I happen to think that there is good reason to believe current wind turbine designs won't scale well beyond ~10MW because of a simple square-cube law that dictates that for every doubling of rotor diameter, you get a quadrupling of power produced (that's your income) and an octupling of the torque on the gearbox (that's your cost) - heavier gearbox, heavier dome, heavier tower, costlier tower. Moreover, increasing wages are also going to limit the reduction potential. Wind turbines are simply enormously labor intensive, so at some point, the cost of labor is going start to drive the cost of the system. In fact, the report you linked seems to show indications of this when you look at the graph on page 49 for years 2004 - 2009. I don't think all of that growth was natural, certainly there was room to combat it via some larger turbines with better $/kW economies, however, at least to some degree, labor costs were driving that, and they'll begin to do so again once wages in the US start to pick up again. Only time will tell, though.
With the numerous ways of matching and storing wind energy
Such as what ways? Oh right, you mean like running fossil fuel plants and emitting CO2. Like how Germany added ~18% of renewables from 2003 and only had a ~9% reduction in CO2 per capita (and kWh per capita stayed pretty much flat
As I said above, you're wrong to think Chinese don't do things on-time and on-budget.
No, all it says is that the articles you linked had the wrong estimate in them. I think it was more of a fluff info piece to make them look good in the media.
as they can't even make proper estimates
You try to make it seem like they were pumping these reactors out by the dozens and got all of it wrong. The reactor was completely new with not a single unit completed at the time construction started, so it was a rough estimate at best. Areva themselves were still learning on the construction side of the EPR design. Once they have a few units built, you'll see the estimates stabilize.
I don't want to contemplate how safe their plants will end up being
Go ahead, contemplate. EDF has a 30% stake in the plant and they too are on the hook for any operational trouble, so you can be pretty sure they're watching the project with a microscope.
Interesting, though it confirms my suspicion that we're talking about a few percent at most - only then *perhaps* it's doable. But anything more significant and you'll damage your gas network. H2 has very different material and mechanical properties for which the CH4 network was not designed. I'm not even sure what they're doing now won't do damage in the future - H2 has a tendency to embrittle and seep out of steel pipes and it eats through seals like crazy. And you can also forget about liquefaction for use in transport and such like, CH4 and H2 liquify under vastly different conditions - my guess is after liquefaction of CH4 the still gaseous molecular H2 is simply allowed to escape.
And articles in german aren't a problem for me, don't worry.
Except that for one thing, "on budget" required the Canadian taxpayer to provide China with over $1.5 billion in interest-free loans.
This is actually pretty common practice on large-scale projects that are going to benefit the local economy. The US, for example, gives out billions of dollars yearly in low-interest loans so that foreign entities purchase US-made goods (see http://www.exim.gov/). Canada might have considered its sale to China to be of such strategic importance that it even went for an interest-free loan. So don't try and portray it as "the Canadian taxpayer" not getting their money's worth - overall, the Canadian economy most probably benefitted from it and that might warrant some investment from the exporting country.
Why we should need to do that, when China has all of our money already from all of us buying Salad Shooters, is open to interpretation. That interpretation is "we paid them to take this white elephant off our hands".
I love it how from a flawed premise ("China has all our money from exports, so why are we paying them!") come to a completely bogus conclusion ("they took it off our hands"). FYI, China had a bidding process where nuclear power construction companies submitted bids and China negotiated and picked the ones that looked best to it and if the Canadian government got involved and sweetened the deal to get some benefit back to Canadian industry, then that's a good thing - it's capitalism at work. Just because some portions of the Chinese manufacturing and export industry have high income from export, doesn't mean other parts of the Chinese economy needs to overpay for imported goods.
Oh, and then there's the part where we leased them the heavy water basically for free, instead of selling it which would have broken the budget ($200/kg, 1,000,000 kg required).
Can you get the actual value for the lease? I found the same Sierra Club article you probably got your figure from and it doesn't mention it. Besides a "basically for free" lease isn't entirely free, so overall it might be just another way to sweeten the deal to get a sale and extract value down the line.
And why would the Canadian government need to second-guess the environmental assessment of a construction site in China? It's the Chinese government's job.
I don't have the time to fact-check everything you say, but overall you seem extremely unhappy about a deal that's pretty standard, even beneficial to the Canadian economy. Could the Canadian government have gotten a better deal? Maybe. But to cry foul over what are in effect trivial problems seems nonsensical to me.
Original Taishan NPP plan schedule called for entering commercial service in 2013, full stop.
Then that estimate was quite simply wrong. There's no way in hell that October 2009 + 4 years means you start commercial service in 2013. My guess is it was a neat little fairy tale told to reporters to keep up a nice face, while the project managers knew well that 2014 was more probable.
Yes, if you don't consider the delays, any project will be 'roughly on schedule'.
You can't honestly say that externally imposed unscheduled delays are to be blamed on the project's management. For example, blaming bad weather for not making your offshore wind farm construction schedules. Large projects can have unforeseen complications and first of their kind projects especially so. Cut the guys some slack, both the nuclear and wind ones, they've got a tough job. Design and manufacturing faults, though, (also mentioned in the linked article) are correct to blame on the project.
Ah, Wikipedia, that ever reliable source of unbiased and completely objective analysis on matters of significant nuance.
Nuclear generated electricity is expensive.
Depends on type, project and installation. The utilities building them seem quite content to keep going, as they see them being competitive with current baseload sources.
Thorium nuclear generated electricity is even more expensive due to the reactor design needing to be more robust.
Actually, in most Thorium molten-salt designs, the reactor is a lot less robust (in terms of raw materials, at least), because molten-salt isn't pressurized, so there's no need for a big heavy pressure vessel and an enormous containment building around it. But it really depends on the exact design you are talking about - perhaps clarify and we can have a more informed discussion. In any case, I'd contend your blanket statement of "Thorium nuclear generated electricity is even more expensive". That claim requires access to broad knowledge of the cost structure of Thorium power reactor designs and as far as I know, those aren't available yet.
Citation needed, the articles I've read claimed $1000 to $2000 per kilo.
You are correct, *at present* it is indeed pretty high (which would mean we'd just favor mining). The cost reduction into the $300/kg category would require some advances in the material properties of the absorbent used: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi...
So consider ~$1500/kg the top-end estimate should uranium mining become completely unviable (we've again got thousands upon thousands of years of mineable Uranium at $500/kg, so I'm hopeful the absorbent properties can be sorted by then; or indeed we might finally crack fusion - that'd be the coolest of all prospects). In any case, thanks for the heads up on the present-day costs.
If these new designs are so great then why does the nuclear industry keep going with the old designs?
A few points to this:
1) Give them some time, they are slowly coming along. Anything nuclear is needs to be approached very carefully. If all goes well, we should see the pilot plants coming online in the early 2020s.
2) By and large the new nuclear construction projects are building Gen III units such as the AP1000, EPR, ABWR and VVER-1200, all of which have much improved on the light-water concept (though they aren't strictly revolutionary - well, perhaps the AP1000 is a bit closer to being a significant departure). 3) There is, in fact, one pilot Gen IV plant already built and about to be commissioned (the Beloyarsk 4 unit), running a BN-800 reactor, a pool-type liquid sodium-cooled fast breeder. I don't think it's the best design, but it's a step in the right direction. It will be a proving ground and a learning platform for their mass-production units (BN-1200). We'll have to wait and see.
Fukushima put quite a kink in any new construction in China, as there was a construction approval halt for near-sea reactors from April to at least October in 2011 (and Taishan is what you might call close to the sea) - half a year delay can easily get you some delay in onlining. You also need to keep in mind that 46 months was the planned construction time, not when it enters commercial service. With first concrete being poured in October 2009, construction should have been complete in about autumn 2013, but adding the half- to one-year delay due to Fukushima, we'd expect it to complete construction some time in 2014. And according to the WNN article I linked, startup should indeed happen this year and commissioning into commercial service, next year (you need to train people, run safety drills, test out all the maintenance and refueling equipment and failsafes, etc. - that takes some time after construction).
So if you consider the ripple that Fukushima sent into the world of nuclear reactor construction projects, Taishan is indeed roughly on schedule. I guess if you wanted to split hairs and talk about plus or minus a few months, sure, but I don't see it as much of a problem, especially when you compare it to the monumental management disaster that is Olkiluoto 3.
ISTM that Homo economicus is almost incapable of resisting the urge to cut corners in the design, construction, operation, and inspection of nuclear power plants. (And in non-nuclear projects as well, though few have the destructive potential of Cherynobyl.)
Which is why we need a strong state-sponsored regulatory body which keeps the industry in check. There is of course a balance to be struck between overregulation and letting the industry run wild, where we encourage societal progress while keeping whacky ideas at bay. Most of all, we need a good open and transparent process. And finally we should help the population maintain a level-headed approach to danger assessment. Radiation is nothing to mess with for sure, but the actual destructive impact of even extremely messed up situations (such as Chernobyl) is vastly overblown by quite unfounded fears. By the logic that people will cut corners to save a buck we shouldn't be building hydroelectricity, since every so often a dam bursts and drowns people, or some piping failure kills them or the water flow destroys large tracts of land.
And with the past few decades' huge increase in pressure to cut corners in order to maximize short-term profit, I suspect things will get worse before they get better.
Not necessarily, as modern digital simulation and modeling technology allows us to see in exquisite detail what reactor designers of old could only guess at. For all intents and purposes, it is night and day different and has the potential to transform the nuclear industry same as any other it has touched.
As for the Chinese... have they hit on a better approach than capitalism, or are they practicing the Soviet-style corner-cutting that gave us Chernyobyl?
No, but they have very strict project and schedule control and the can-do spirit that we've lost in the hippie 70s, which is why they're able to execute on the project much more efficiently. As for your insinuation that they might be doing "Soviet-style corner-cutting", the project at Taishan is 30% co-owned by Électricité de France, which is acutely aware that problems in China will cast a very negative light on them back home.
This is quite not true. Resource availability is largely dictated by the price you're willing to pay for it - in typical scenarios a doubling of the price expands viable resources 10-fold. Moreover, even today's reactors are "breeders" in a sense, they just don't make 100% of their fuel (breeding ratio is typically somewhere around 0.3). There are some quite interesting businesses working towards "converter" or "burner" molten-salt reactors based on a combined thorium/uranium cycle which trades the breeding ratio for a massively simplified core design, single-fluid approach (plumbing problem gone), no need for in-line salt reprocessing (no more complex in-situ nuclear chemistry) and much better proliferation resistance (since it's running on LEU with no Pa separation). It also maintains the most attractive aspects of molten-salt, such as very high burnup, high temperature, a compact core, full passive safety, FP off-gassing and no need for fuel fabrication. You do need to periodically add in some 20% LEU fissile makeup to compensate for the '< 1' breeding ratio (<5% LEU when running with no Thorium), but it's still about 6x less than conventional light-water and the simplifications in the design are enormous. The design's main proponent, David LeBlanc, estimates that such a reactor would have fuel costs on the order of $0.1c/kWh and that even if the price of Uranium rose to $500/kg (4-5x what it's now), it'd still only be $0.2c/kWh and at that price we'd have essentially unlimited Uranium supplies (the world's oceans contain thousands upon thousands of years worth of Uranium recoverable at only $300-$400/kg).
Honestly, this is the worst defeatist attitude I can imagine. "We are bad at building stuff, so we shouldn't build stuff." How come the Chinese are building these very same reactors on-time and on-budget? We in the west need to get off our collective lazy asses and start making stuff with our hands again.
Feeding H2 created by electrolysis into the gas grid and using a gas turbine connected to the gas grid during high demand.
Can you quote some references for this? Because I'm kinda skeptical they're "feeding H2 ... into the gas grid". They might feed methane after combining the H2 with a source of carbon to create CH4, losing at least 50% of the input energy in the process (and another 25% after combustion in a CCGT, or more in an OCGT), plus needing a carbon sources (typically biomass, but can be CCS). But as for molecular H2 in a natural gas pipe ... no chance.
Average contamination in 2009 was 7000 Bq/Kg in the highiest contaminated area.
60% of the time, it works every time :)
Unless you happen to be identifying an actual shill.
No, it is still the lowest forms of argumentation, not because of the factuality of the ties of a speaker with the technology or industry they are defending, but because they attack the speaker instead of the arguments they present - it's a form of ad-hominem attack. Kinda like saying that Christian apologetics is invalid because those presenting the arguments are typically Christian themselves (they might even be pastors - oh noes!). To accuse them of "shilling for their religion" would be dumb and immediately discarded as a tactic of character assassination, of trying to dodge the argument itself.
Oh and after some more googling I found that his son's statements have been corroborated by other people in Strauss' senior's circle and by independent events (such as him heading the US fusion power research program): http://www.dailykos.com/story/...
In any case, whatever he meant, it was a rhetoric statement, torn completely out of context and expressing a personal sentiment, not the official stance of the atomic energy program. So the more one relies on hyping this quote mine, the more it is shown that the speaker is unable to come up with actual, factual arguments to support their position.