Not ONE post from someone complaining that wind can't possibly work, and the only possible solution is to build [insert nuclear power unicorn faerie dust machine here].
> We're exhausting arable land at an alarming rate,
No we're not, not even close.
Today the planet will generate 6,000 calories for everyone on the planet. You need 2,000, so *using today's agriculture* we could support 21 billion people.
However, a considerable amount of currently used land is used extremely inefficiently. About half the planet's arable land is using stone-age methodologies and crop varietals, which offer about 1/4rd the payload per acre or less.
So if all we do is introduce modern methods to the rest of the existing used land, that will increase production to the point where something like 50 or 60 billion can be fed.
And of course, the techniques are improving all the time. I have a friend in the industry who visits the contests across North America. Over the last 10 years the record for corn production per acre has improved something like 15%. There is no sign of this slowing down.
And of course the system as a whole is unbelievably inefficient because we have a meat-heavy diet. We take thousands and thousands of calories and turn them into tens or hundreds. And even our choice of meat is terrible; beef is far, far less efficient to produce than chicken.
The world is literally awash with food, so much that the vast majority of the calories we make are ultimately thrown away. We could *easily* double the population with zero changes to the existing production methods.
> Organic, chemical-free agriculture cannot support our numbers
Completely incorrect. "organic methods could produce enough food on a global per capita basis to sustain the current human population, and potentially an even larger population, without increasing the agricultural land base"
Organic methods generally produce about 80% per acre of basic foodstuffs compared to non-organic methods. That would mean, say, 5,000 calories per person per day on existing land. Still way more than we need. And if we were to eat a little less meat, especially beef, that would free up a lot more.
The difference is not output, but cost. Organic methods generally use much smaller plots of single crops interspersed with similar sized different crops. This means harvesting is more expensive than, say, driving a reaper around a 5000 acre plot. Weeding and pest control are likewise more expensive and time consuming.
But that's it. And since food costs for the average Canadian have dropped from 40% of their take-home pay to under 9% - in spite of far greater amounts of eating at restaurants and other expensive options - we clearly have significant amounts of money we could use to pay for it, if we wanted. I personally don't care, nitrogen is nitrogen.
> Of course they found similar results when compared with placebo
Meaning it's a placebo. *That's the definition.*
> Placebos can actually be effective
Of course, that's why we always test against them.
> To infer that the treatment is useless is actually false
And herein lies your entirely misunderstanding.
There is absolutely no suggestion that the treatment is *useless*. Placebo's work. Really. Almost every time. Having a doctor hand you aspirin rather than the nurse makes it work better. This is widely tested.
The question is not "do placebo's work", the question is "does this work better than a placebo?" That's not because it doesn't work, that's because placebo's DO work. That's the ENTIRE FREAKING CONCEPT OF THE MODERN PHARMACEUTICAL SYSTEM. If you don't know this, go read about how, and especially WHY, we do double-blind studies. The Wiki article is a fine place to start.
The point here is that homeopathic practitioners refuse to admit that it is a placebo. They say it's "real", whatever that means. Well the only way to know is to test it against a placebo. And it fails. Which means it's "not real", whatever that means. It failed the test, homeopathy IS a placebo, that's the definition.
A while back I read an article where they got a bunch of magazine audiophiles to test out some new high-end speaker cables. A little slight-of-hand was used to replace the cables with unfolded wire coat hangers, while appearing to connect the expensive ones. Every reviewer then pronounced the superior sound that was oh-so-obvious.
Maybe this is real, maybe it's not. Does anyone have a link to any concrete example of this story?
Yes, and you also said "gas is the most expensive plant to run apart from nuclear" and that is the exact opposite of the truth.
You did make an error, an egregious one. Given that you replied in less time than it takes to actually read the paper, maybe you should do that first before posting here and digging your hole even deeper.
> But what is very interesting in the source article is that residential solar installations cost more the twice as much as commercial ones
Yup. Economy of scale.
> why in the heck would we subsidize residential solar
Because the price of electricity on the residential side of the meter is more than double the wholesale price. So in the end it's about the same difficulty to do net metering on residential solar than commercial on the other side of the meter.
At the currently tiny fraction of worldwide production. If you are arguing for some sort of fission economy, then there's not nearly enough of the stuff.
> and it'd take so long to build that it'd never be economical.
It doesn't make a difference, the non-nuclear side is already too expensive to build:
There are dozens upon dozens of reports, all easily accessible on the internet, that state in no uncertain terms that the US grid is perfectly capable of handing lots and lots of intermittent power. The last report I read, now outdated as its from 2012, said that California was able to use up to 100% embedded PV. That means you could install PV on everyone's home and office to net meter to zero and the grid would handle it just fine.
> Is there a working large scale CCS project to demonstrate the truth of those facts?
It's right beside the nuclear reactor that didn't go overbudget. Sorry, couldn't resist.
But more directly, there are a number of very large plants, and a whole lot under construction. I was surprised to learn this after all the years of inaction. Prices to date have been on the order of 0.01/kWh LCoE, which is in-line with the estimates in the document I posted.
> Generally, modern small reactors for power generation are expected to have > greater simplicity of design, economy of mass production, and reduced siting costs
All of these statements are likely true, except that they assume, as the quote notes, "mass production".
Nuclear power economy scales *very* strongly with reactor size. That's why almost all modern reactor designs are around 1 GWe. There are somewhat smaller designs, like CANDU6, but they have been unable to compete with the larger designs in the market.
The *very* small designs, the SMR's that you're referring to, attempt to address this through a modular scale-out. But in order for this to work, you need mass production, hundreds or thousands of modules. Until that time, the price/performance appears to be *terrible*. So everyone's sitting on their hands waiting for someone else to pull the trigger. After decades, no one has.
> Most of the losses come not from Areva's core business
You're joking right?! Every reactor they are building is over-budget and draining the company's coffers.
> trying to build a reactor in Finland without its usual parters
They're building them in France with their usual partners, and they're just as much a disaster as Finland.
> getting swindled when buying uranium mines
So, bad management. Which is precisely what you want running a company that makes nuclear reactors.
> investing heavily in renewables because it's cool
And profitable, for most everyone else at least. Did Areva *actually* loose money in renewables? I'm not so sure you actually have numbers on that. But it's worse if its true.
> Nuclear is not expensive, it requires an upfront investment
LOLZ.
You understand that the vast majority of the LCoE from nuclear is the payments on the construction loans, right? And, so, if it requires an upfront investment, that is, by definition, going to make it expensive.
*How* expensive is another question. That is clearly answered by the 11 Euro/kWh price. In other words "youch, expensive!"
Nuclear is expensive. http://www.lazard.com/PDF/Levelized%20Cost%20of%20Energy%20-%20Version%208.0.pdf Look at page 11.
> Project delays are not cheap in nuclear, or a dam (hydro if you will) or a tunnel
Too true. But it is also true that reactor construction has a history of going overbudget on average by two times, making it one of the most consistently bad investments in history.
> Uncertain political environment is a death knell for large scale projects
Also very true. Which is why wind and solar are the fastest growing sources of power in history: a large wind farm can go from napkin sketch to pumping electrons in 18 months. Residential PV can be completely installed in 2 weeks. Arranging financing for these projects is akin to arranging a car loan. The $30 billion needed for 5 years for a reactor? Not so easy.
> I've seen plenty of markets that seemed mature, but the fact those were stagnated due to lack of interest in innovating
Or investment. PV is a clear example of this - panels are selling today below the cost that was predicted only a few years ago to be the lowest possible cost of product. The mad rush of money into the market raised production so much that supply/demand pressed all the input costs way down, while the manufacturers were slitting each other's throats squeezing costs out of their lines. I can't recall anything like it, a 5x decrease in price in under 5 years.
Slashdot Mirror
Not ONE post from someone complaining that wind can't possibly work, and the only possible solution is to build [insert nuclear power unicorn faerie dust machine here].
Wow, the worm has indeed turned.
> We're exhausting arable land at an alarming rate,
No we're not, not even close.
Today the planet will generate 6,000 calories for everyone on the planet. You need 2,000, so *using today's agriculture* we could support 21 billion people.
However, a considerable amount of currently used land is used extremely inefficiently. About half the planet's arable land is using stone-age methodologies and crop varietals, which offer about 1/4rd the payload per acre or less.
So if all we do is introduce modern methods to the rest of the existing used land, that will increase production to the point where something like 50 or 60 billion can be fed.
And of course, the techniques are improving all the time. I have a friend in the industry who visits the contests across North America. Over the last 10 years the record for corn production per acre has improved something like 15%. There is no sign of this slowing down.
And of course the system as a whole is unbelievably inefficient because we have a meat-heavy diet. We take thousands and thousands of calories and turn them into tens or hundreds. And even our choice of meat is terrible; beef is far, far less efficient to produce than chicken.
The world is literally awash with food, so much that the vast majority of the calories we make are ultimately thrown away. We could *easily* double the population with zero changes to the existing production methods.
> Organic, chemical-free agriculture cannot support our numbers
Completely incorrect. "organic methods could produce enough food on a global per capita basis to sustain the current human population, and potentially an even larger population, without increasing the agricultural land base"
Organic methods generally produce about 80% per acre of basic foodstuffs compared to non-organic methods. That would mean, say, 5,000 calories per person per day on existing land. Still way more than we need. And if we were to eat a little less meat, especially beef, that would free up a lot more.
The difference is not output, but cost. Organic methods generally use much smaller plots of single crops interspersed with similar sized different crops. This means harvesting is more expensive than, say, driving a reaper around a 5000 acre plot. Weeding and pest control are likewise more expensive and time consuming.
But that's it. And since food costs for the average Canadian have dropped from 40% of their take-home pay to under 9% - in spite of far greater amounts of eating at restaurants and other expensive options - we clearly have significant amounts of money we could use to pay for it, if we wanted. I personally don't care, nitrogen is nitrogen.
Seriously, read a little. Start on the Wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_farming
> Has anyone studied the effect on the environment of taking all of that energy out of the wind
Yes. There's this thing called Google, you should try it some time. I did, and it took me directly to this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_wind_power
> That's quite a statement to make ...because it's completely wrong.
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2895013/new-solar-installs-beat-wind-and-coal-two-years-in-a-row.html
Geez people, this was posted here all of *yesterday*.
> Of course they found similar results when compared with placebo
Meaning it's a placebo. *That's the definition.*
> Placebos can actually be effective
Of course, that's why we always test against them.
> To infer that the treatment is useless is actually false
And herein lies your entirely misunderstanding.
There is absolutely no suggestion that the treatment is *useless*. Placebo's work. Really. Almost every time. Having a doctor hand you aspirin rather than the nurse makes it work better. This is widely tested.
The question is not "do placebo's work", the question is "does this work better than a placebo?" That's not because it doesn't work, that's because placebo's DO work. That's the ENTIRE FREAKING CONCEPT OF THE MODERN PHARMACEUTICAL SYSTEM. If you don't know this, go read about how, and especially WHY, we do double-blind studies. The Wiki article is a fine place to start.
The point here is that homeopathic practitioners refuse to admit that it is a placebo. They say it's "real", whatever that means. Well the only way to know is to test it against a placebo. And it fails. Which means it's "not real", whatever that means. It failed the test, homeopathy IS a placebo, that's the definition.
Ahhh, opportune time to ask:
A while back I read an article where they got a bunch of magazine audiophiles to test out some new high-end speaker cables. A little slight-of-hand was used to replace the cables with unfolded wire coat hangers, while appearing to connect the expensive ones. Every reviewer then pronounced the superior sound that was oh-so-obvious.
Maybe this is real, maybe it's not. Does anyone have a link to any concrete example of this story?
It's not really an issue tracker, but I use it for tracking issues and features during build cycles.
It's *super* easy to set up and add items.
Yes, and you also said "gas is the most expensive plant to run apart from nuclear" and that is the exact opposite of the truth.
You did make an error, an egregious one. Given that you replied in less time than it takes to actually read the paper, maybe you should do that first before posting here and digging your hole even deeper.
> The capacity of solar panels is found by exposing the panel to a set amount of light
No it's not, that's nameplace capacity. Capacity factor is "how much does the sun shine". You get it from a weather forecasting tool, like this one...
http://pvwatts.nrel.gov
> That make coal power more stable and valuable
And natural gas is even more dispatchable, which is why they're shutting down the coal plants as this paper notes.
> But gas is the most expensive plant to run apart from nuclear
OMG, read something before posting!
http://www.lazard.com/PDF/Levelized%20Cost%20of%20Energy%20-%20Version%208.0.pdf
Gas cogen is *significantly* less expensive than nuclear. The only thing that comes close is wind, everything else is more expensive.
> But what is very interesting in the source article is that residential solar installations cost more the twice as much as commercial ones
Yup. Economy of scale.
> why in the heck would we subsidize residential solar
Because the price of electricity on the residential side of the meter is more than double the wholesale price. So in the end it's about the same difficulty to do net metering on residential solar than commercial on the other side of the meter.
> The public largely rejected nuclear, yet reality says all those electric cars will need to plug into something.
Already taken care of:
https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2014/09/16/future-grid-energy-in-the-not-so-distance/
> The way to get more nuclear is to never mention the word
And to lower the CAPEX four times. THAT is something no one has figured out yet.
> The military hardly uses plutonium
Wut? That's practically all they use.
> current price to last several hundred years
At the currently tiny fraction of worldwide production. If you are arguing for some sort of fission economy, then there's not nearly enough of the stuff.
> and it'd take so long to build that it'd never be economical.
It doesn't make a difference, the non-nuclear side is already too expensive to build:
https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2015/02/28/fusion-aint-gonna-happen
> Sure, it is technically correct
No it's not.
There are dozens upon dozens of reports, all easily accessible on the internet, that state in no uncertain terms that the US grid is perfectly capable of handing lots and lots of intermittent power. The last report I read, now outdated as its from 2012, said that California was able to use up to 100% embedded PV. That means you could install PV on everyone's home and office to net meter to zero and the grid would handle it just fine.
http://www.cpuc.ca.gov/NR/rdonlyres/8A822C08-A56C-4674-A5D2-099E48B41160/0/LDPVPotentialReportMarch2012.pdf
Why would this person turn to /. for an answer?
That does not seem wise.
> But you have to understand the scale of energy production that they are capable of
Of course you do, it's called CF. And when you divide CAPEX by CF you get a rough estimate of the cost of the power in question. So let's do that.
Wind turbines here in Ontario have CF's on the order of 30%. CAPEX is around $1.50/W. So that's 1.5 / .3 = $5 effective CAPEX.
Darlington B was low-balled at $8.25/W and would have a CF around 90%. So that's 8.25 / .9 = $9.17 effective CAPEX
So even though I have to built three units of wind for every unit of nuke, it's still half as expensive. And that's why they cancelled Darlington B.
> Is there a working large scale CCS project to demonstrate the truth of those facts?
It's right beside the nuclear reactor that didn't go overbudget. Sorry, couldn't resist.
But more directly, there are a number of very large plants, and a whole lot under construction. I was surprised to learn this after all the years of inaction. Prices to date have been on the order of 0.01/kWh LCoE, which is in-line with the estimates in the document I posted.
> Generally, modern small reactors for power generation are expected to have
> greater simplicity of design, economy of mass production, and reduced siting costs
All of these statements are likely true, except that they assume, as the quote notes, "mass production".
Nuclear power economy scales *very* strongly with reactor size. That's why almost all modern reactor designs are around 1 GWe. There are somewhat smaller designs, like CANDU6, but they have been unable to compete with the larger designs in the market.
The *very* small designs, the SMR's that you're referring to, attempt to address this through a modular scale-out. But in order for this to work, you need mass production, hundreds or thousands of modules. Until that time, the price/performance appears to be *terrible*. So everyone's sitting on their hands waiting for someone else to pull the trigger. After decades, no one has.
> Most of the losses come not from Areva's core business
You're joking right?! Every reactor they are building is over-budget and draining the company's coffers.
> trying to build a reactor in Finland without its usual parters
They're building them in France with their usual partners, and they're just as much a disaster as Finland.
> getting swindled when buying uranium mines
So, bad management. Which is precisely what you want running a company that makes nuclear reactors.
> investing heavily in renewables because it's cool
And profitable, for most everyone else at least. Did Areva *actually* loose money in renewables? I'm not so sure you actually have numbers on that. But it's worse if its true.
> Nuclear is not expensive, it requires an upfront investment
LOLZ.
You understand that the vast majority of the LCoE from nuclear is the payments on the construction loans, right? And, so, if it requires an upfront investment, that is, by definition, going to make it expensive.
*How* expensive is another question. That is clearly answered by the 11 Euro/kWh price. In other words "youch, expensive!"
> And they're still lower than the costs of fossil fuel based technologies
Gas plants with CCS cost less than nuclear. Coal with CCS is about the same price.
> Nuclear is cheap.
Nuclear is expensive. http://www.lazard.com/PDF/Levelized%20Cost%20of%20Energy%20-%20Version%208.0.pdf Look at page 11.
> Project delays are not cheap in nuclear, or a dam (hydro if you will) or a tunnel
Too true. But it is also true that reactor construction has a history of going overbudget on average by two times, making it one of the most consistently bad investments in history.
> Uncertain political environment is a death knell for large scale projects
Also very true. Which is why wind and solar are the fastest growing sources of power in history: a large wind farm can go from napkin sketch to pumping electrons in 18 months. Residential PV can be completely installed in 2 weeks. Arranging financing for these projects is akin to arranging a car loan. The $30 billion needed for 5 years for a reactor? Not so easy.
> This heat warms the atmosphere
No it doesn't. Waste heat rapidly radiates into space. Temperatures only rise if you interrupt the radiation, say though GHG's that trap it.
> The more wind energy we use the stronger the winds
Premise incorrect, conclusion non-factual by default.
> I've seen plenty of markets that seemed mature, but the fact those were stagnated due to lack of interest in innovating
Or investment. PV is a clear example of this - panels are selling today below the cost that was predicted only a few years ago to be the lowest possible cost of product. The mad rush of money into the market raised production so much that supply/demand pressed all the input costs way down, while the manufacturers were slitting each other's throats squeezing costs out of their lines. I can't recall anything like it, a 5x decrease in price in under 5 years.
> Who exactly are "clean power foes"?
Well, Americans For Prosperity for one. More generally, anyone with a coal plant that doesn't have easy access to natgas.