Re batteries, The purpose of the video is to show the potential of battery storage. Anti-renewables people like to claim there is no viable solution to the variability of wind and solar, clearly that isn't true.
Re solar price, Yes there are subsidies for renewables, but those subsidies aren't even needed now, the payback for a roof solar system is about 6 years with subsidy and 12 years without. I can understand the initial reasoning for the generation subsidy but even I think that should be phased out with that information being clearly given.
To reiterate, solar will still pay for itself without subsidy, solar panels are still 80 to 87% efficient after 25 years. ( http://energyinformative.org/l... )
Tesla batteries work out to about $240 per Kwh. The implication there is that you could store a days worth of electricity for an average UK household in just $1608 (962gbp) worth of batteries. And battery technology is advancing rapidly, the cost is falling by 10-15% per year.
WHO like to pretend the death toll from Chernobyl etc are very low, they fiddle the figures by ignoring cancer deaths that can't be proven on an individual basis to be due to Chernobyl. Obviously, ignoring most of the increase in cancer deaths looks good for nuclear. Ukraine estimate up to 500,000 deaths due to Chernobyl, naturally some Ukrainians are biased due to Russia-Ukraine issues. WHO estimate 4,000 deaths.
Crap like:
the panel said it was difficult to determine that a causal link existed between the childrenâ(TM)s cancers and the [Fukushima] triple meltdown
Re Solar roof deaths, HSE need to strike down companies with poor safety standards, that is an issue that can be dealt with. But there is a big difference between someone choosing to go up on a roof and someone dying of cancer because of an accident a thousand miles away.
In the UK HSE is strict, a roofer who didn't properly supervise went to prison, company was fined £250,000.
I've been modded troll for debating against nuclear before, recommend you contact admin, that's a dirty way to try to win an argument.
You are right of course, 5 years from now the debate will be over. Solar reached grid parity for 99% of the worlds residential populations - 105 countries 2 years ago.
Married with geothermal and up and coming mass storage technologies, renewables will take the market - money talks.
PS if solar installation growth was to continue at it's current rate it would surpass the current total global capacity of 16,000GW by 2028!! By 2030 it would be 40,000GW
Geothermal potential is said to be 16,000GW globally.
People have a funny habit of making linear predictions based upon numbers which are moving exponentially through time.
Solar: The GW of solar power being installed globally is increasing exponentially. The price of solar panels is dropping exponentially. At the same time the efficiency of solar panels is increasing rapidly.
Battery / Large scale energy storage. This technology is also coming along leaps and bounds, the cost of storage looks set to drop below $100 per kWh, very likely before 2020.
This means that battery storage can replace all 'gas peaker' and also deal with solar's daily fluctuation and some of wind's fluctuating power too.
Geothermal is also massively under-utilised, I'd guess that Hawaii could benefit greatly from a geothermal / solar mix.
The argument against wind and solar tends to completely ignore the fact that there are a myriad of ways to store energy, and we have barely begun to explore all the methods and go down the path of continual cost cutting that is typical in new technologies.
Solar and wind will soon be so cheap that they will be unstoppable, subsidies will no longer be needed a couple of years from now (they are not needed in the UK and some other countries at this point in time).
Tesla's replacement 85kwh car battery comes to $140 per kWh based on the wiki numbers, other companies are joining the market, one said they can produce at $160 per kWh of storage. There is no reason why these batteries can't be married with renewables to take 90%+ of the market in the coming years. There is no reason to believe these prices won't continue to drop.
It looks like renewables + storage will be very feasible in most of the world within the next decade or two. The video I linked shows it is being trialled in the UK right now.
The prices of battery storage and solar power are dropping through the floor, any gov't who sanctions extremely expensive nuclear power right now are idiots.
With battery storage Solar and Wind can easily power most of the worlds energy needs, several European countries are already hitting 50%+ renewable energy.
Without subsidy, solar panels on roofs in the UK can pay for themselves in only 12 years, after that it's practically free electricity. With the current subsidies payback now only takes 6 years! US red tape and profiteering is causing US residential solar to be overly expensive.
"monkeys are about the same as those found in sheep in some parts of the **UK** following the Chernobyl accident, i.e. extremely low.."
They measured cesium in the UK sheep, the levels were too high for 26 years after the Chernobyl disaster. I remember having to drink powdered milk because cows milk was radioactively contaminated. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-eng...
"in terms of damage to the animals themselves. I think it much more likely that the apparently low blood cell counts are caused by something other than radiation"
Such as? And why would you go for the non-obvious answer.
Wow, what a ginormous waste of money - does it even include the massive subsidies that they will get for the electricity as they rob the taxpayer to pay their share-holders.
Some quick math, $27b would buy 20GW of solar panels at consumer retail price, 13GW installed utility scale.
$27bil could buy 62 to 101GWh of battery storage.
And how big is this nuclear power station going to be? Only 3.2GW
Indeed that 'Scientific' American graph reeks of bias against renewables.
I'd like to see their explanation of how uranium doesn't require the largest amount of energy to process or that somehow the nuclear industry doesn't use much uranium relative to all of the other industries.
Also noted that they make weasely comments against solar and wind but not coal etc (growing crops for fuel is retarded outright).
I'm getting sick of all the bad science coming out of supposedly good institutions. There's been the BS article about nuclear's carbon footprint that conveniently ignores much of the nuclear power cycle. And the spurious crap like wind power kills a lot of birds, wind power is noisy, wind power is too intermittent, wind turbines break a lot and have short lifespans, solar is expensive, there isn't enough room for solar or wind, renewables transmission is too expensive.
EDF say 20-25 years but then go on to say that the wind turbines built 30 years ago are still going strong. Thankfully unlike nuclear there isn't a risk of the turbines going catastrophically wrong and polluting half the planet.
Like the Brookings Study you seem to ignore the large amount of energy that mining, transporting and processing the nuclear fuel requires.
Humans have shown themselves to utterly incapable of handling nuclear power without making a mess of it. Sooner or later renewables will be the only option, we might as well start big with it now whilst we still have alternatives as a temporary backup
Over 50 years of nuclear power and still the wrangling over what to do with the waste.
Renewables are cheaper in the long run, far greener, more predictable, capable of running the planet 10x over for possibly billions of years to come.
CO2 emissions calculated by RTE do not take into account carbon emissions generated during construction of production means, or carbon emissions generated during the extraction / transformation / or transport cycle of combustibles employed.
When they leave out so much, their figures become meaningless, 'construction of production', 'extraction / transformation' and the transport and storage of waste and the decommissioning of plants potentially accounts for well over half of overall carbon emissions.
The link I provided is more accurate because it takes those factors into account.
Solar and wind farms are also not a massive liability 30 years after their construction, they would most likely still be of considerable value after that time.
So, the radioactive waters can traverse to ocean without completely dispersing. And note the diagrams all showing the current goes from japan to the US... and back.
Cesium levels in the Pacific had initially gone up an astonishing 45 million times above pre-accident levels. The levels then declined rapidly for a while, but after that, they unexpectedly levelled off.
In July, cesium levels stopped declining and remained stuck at 10,000 times above pre-accident levels.
This means the ocean isnâ(TM)t diluting the radiation as expected. If it had been, cesium levels would have kept falling.
The finding suggests that radiation is still being released into the ocean long after the accident in March, 2011.
You incorrectly assume that water in the global oceans quickly mixes with all of the other water, I expect that process takes centuries considering the size of the oceans.
According to Sovacool's analysis, nuclear power, at 66 gCO2e/kWh emissions is well below scrubbed coal-fired plants, which emit 960 gCO2e/kWh, and natural gas-fired plants, at 443 gCO2e/kWh. However, nuclear emits twice as much carbon as solar photovoltaic, at 32 gCO2e/kWh, and six times as much as onshore wind farms, at 10 gCO2e/kWh.
According to Sovacool's analysis, nuclear power, at 66 gCO2e/kWh emissions is well below scrubbed coal-fired plants, which emit 960 gCO2e/kWh, and natural gas-fired plants, at 443 gCO2e/kWh. However, nuclear emits twice as much carbon as solar photovoltaic, at 32 gCO2e/kWh, and six times as much as onshore wind farms, at 10 gCO2e/kWh.
Slashdot Mirror
Re batteries, The purpose of the video is to show the potential of battery storage. Anti-renewables people like to claim there is no viable solution to the variability of wind and solar, clearly that isn't true.
Re solar price, Yes there are subsidies for renewables, but those subsidies aren't even needed now, the payback for a roof solar system is about 6 years with subsidy and 12 years without. I can understand the initial reasoning for the generation subsidy but even I think that should be phased out with that information being clearly given.
To reiterate, solar will still pay for itself without subsidy, solar panels are still 80 to 87% efficient after 25 years. ( http://energyinformative.org/l... )
Tesla batteries work out to about $240 per Kwh. The implication there is that you could store a days worth of electricity for an average UK household in just $1608 (962gbp) worth of batteries. And battery technology is advancing rapidly, the cost is falling by 10-15% per year.
WHO like to pretend the death toll from Chernobyl etc are very low, they fiddle the figures by ignoring cancer deaths that can't be proven on an individual basis to be due to Chernobyl. Obviously, ignoring most of the increase in cancer deaths looks good for nuclear. Ukraine estimate up to 500,000 deaths due to Chernobyl, naturally some Ukrainians are biased due to Russia-Ukraine issues. WHO estimate 4,000 deaths.
Crap like:
after a 50% increase in Thyroid cancers. How can anyone trust cancer figures from these people?
http://enenews.com/50-increase...
Re Solar roof deaths, HSE need to strike down companies with poor safety standards, that is an issue that can be dealt with. But there is a big difference between someone choosing to go up on a roof and someone dying of cancer because of an accident a thousand miles away.
In the UK HSE is strict, a roofer who didn't properly supervise went to prison, company was fined £250,000.
Everything costs money to make and install. Really not sure what your point is.
Solar:
http://www.theecoexperts.co.uk...
You'd be crazy not to install solar if your roof is pointing the right direction in the UK.
These power grid guys have worked out how to deal with the fluctuations:
Fully Charged - Electrical energy storage and its place in a low carbon future.
OMG panic, it's terrible, renewables have caused there to be cheap electricity, won't somebody think of the profits.
I've been modded troll for debating against nuclear before, recommend you contact admin, that's a dirty way to try to win an argument.
You are right of course, 5 years from now the debate will be over. Solar reached grid parity for 99% of the worlds residential populations - 105 countries 2 years ago.
Married with geothermal and up and coming mass storage technologies, renewables will take the market - money talks.
Forbes didn't do any research they merely took the figures from this bunk: http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/...
The estimates for deaths from Chernobyl range from 4,000 to 500,000 guess which figure 'nextbigfuture' picked.
He also ignores all uranium mining deaths.
He also makes an absurd arbitrary assumption that 30% of all construction deaths from falling from heights are due to solar!!!!!
That page isn't a paper, it isn't peer reviewed, it's a blog and it's 6 years old (before Fukushima)
PS if solar installation growth was to continue at it's current rate it would surpass the current total global capacity of 16,000GW by 2028!! By 2030 it would be 40,000GW
Geothermal potential is said to be 16,000GW globally.
People have a funny habit of making linear predictions based upon numbers which are moving exponentially through time.
Solar: The GW of solar power being installed globally is increasing exponentially. The price of solar panels is dropping exponentially. At the same time the efficiency of solar panels is increasing rapidly.
Battery / Large scale energy storage. This technology is also coming along leaps and bounds, the cost of storage looks set to drop below $100 per kWh, very likely before 2020.
This means that battery storage can replace all 'gas peaker' and also deal with solar's daily fluctuation and some of wind's fluctuating power too.
Geothermal is also massively under-utilised, I'd guess that Hawaii could benefit greatly from a geothermal / solar mix.
The argument against wind and solar tends to completely ignore the fact that there are a myriad of ways to store energy, and we have barely begun to explore all the methods and go down the path of continual cost cutting that is typical in new technologies.
Solar and wind will soon be so cheap that they will be unstoppable, subsidies will no longer be needed a couple of years from now (they are not needed in the UK and some other countries at this point in time).
Problem solved: Fully Charged - Electrical energy storage and its place in a low carbon future.
Tesla's replacement 85kwh car battery comes to $140 per kWh based on the wiki numbers, other companies are joining the market, one said they can produce at $160 per kWh of storage. There is no reason why these batteries can't be married with renewables to take 90%+ of the market in the coming years. There is no reason to believe these prices won't continue to drop.
So why not grid level storage, this video shows it can be very useful:
Fully Charged - Electrical energy storage and its place in a low carbon future.
It looks like renewables + storage will be very feasible in most of the world within the next decade or two. The video I linked shows it is being trialled in the UK right now.
Nuclear is dead, coal and gas are next, the writing is on the wall. http://solarcellcentral.com/im...
The prices of battery storage and solar power are dropping through the floor, any gov't who sanctions extremely expensive nuclear power right now are idiots.
With battery storage Solar and Wind can easily power most of the worlds energy needs, several European countries are already hitting 50%+ renewable energy.
Without subsidy, solar panels on roofs in the UK can pay for themselves in only 12 years, after that it's practically free electricity. With the current subsidies payback now only takes 6 years! US red tape and profiteering is causing US residential solar to be overly expensive.
http://mic.com/articles/91313/...
The storage necessity myth: how to choreograph high-renewables electricity systems
They measured cesium in the UK sheep, the levels were too high for 26 years after the Chernobyl disaster. I remember having to drink powdered milk because cows milk was radioactively contaminated. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-eng...
Such as? And why would you go for the non-obvious answer.
It was anticipated by the architect, but the builders decided to skip the 'death-ray-stopper' addition to the building to save money.
Raises an interesting question - should planning authorities be partly responsible for allowing dangerous buildings of this nature?
The architect designed in a solution to the death ray before the 'walkie talkie' was built.
The builders cut costs and didn't add the sunshades, so blame the builders and planning authority.
Wow, what a ginormous waste of money - does it even include the massive subsidies that they will get for the electricity as they rob the taxpayer to pay their share-holders.
Some quick math, $27b would buy 20GW of solar panels at consumer retail price, 13GW installed utility scale.
$27bil could buy 62 to 101GWh of battery storage.
And how big is this nuclear power station going to be? Only 3.2GW
Indeed that 'Scientific' American graph reeks of bias against renewables.
I'd like to see their explanation of how uranium doesn't require the largest amount of energy to process or that somehow the nuclear industry doesn't use much uranium relative to all of the other industries.
Also noted that they make weasely comments against solar and wind but not coal etc (growing crops for fuel is retarded outright).
I'm getting sick of all the bad science coming out of supposedly good institutions. There's been the BS article about nuclear's carbon footprint that conveniently ignores much of the nuclear power cycle. And the spurious crap like wind power kills a lot of birds, wind power is noisy, wind power is too intermittent, wind turbines break a lot and have short lifespans, solar is expensive, there isn't enough room for solar or wind, renewables transmission is too expensive.
You grew up in a pond, are you a frog?
In the UK a pond is 10ft, 400 acres is a big lake.
http://www.edf-er.com/AboutWin...
EDF say 20-25 years but then go on to say that the wind turbines built 30 years ago are still going strong. Thankfully unlike nuclear there isn't a risk of the turbines going catastrophically wrong and polluting half the planet.
Forbes on carbon footprint:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/am...
Nature on carbon footprint:
http://www.nature.com/climate/...
Like the Brookings Study you seem to ignore the large amount of energy that mining, transporting and processing the nuclear fuel requires.
Humans have shown themselves to utterly incapable of handling nuclear power without making a mess of it. Sooner or later renewables will be the only option, we might as well start big with it now whilst we still have alternatives as a temporary backup
Over 50 years of nuclear power and still the wrangling over what to do with the waste.
Renewables are cheaper in the long run, far greener, more predictable, capable of running the planet 10x over for possibly billions of years to come.
When they leave out so much, their figures become meaningless, 'construction of production', 'extraction / transformation' and the transport and storage of waste and the decommissioning of plants potentially accounts for well over half of overall carbon emissions.
The link I provided is more accurate because it takes those factors into account.
Solar and wind farms are also not a massive liability 30 years after their construction, they would most likely still be of considerable value after that time.
When cars move, do they disperse? No.
The ocean has currents:
https://www.google.co.uk/searc...
So, the radioactive waters can traverse to ocean without completely dispersing. And note the diagrams all showing the current goes from japan to the US... and back.
In fact where I live in Europe is warm because water travels around the globe without dispersing
https://www.google.co.uk/searc...
...And
http://www.thelibertybeacon.co...
You incorrectly assume that water in the global oceans quickly mixes with all of the other water, I expect that process takes centuries considering the size of the oceans.
Radioactive materials do not "disperse nicely"
http://www.theguardian.com/env....
http://enenews.com/vancouver-s...
http://naturalsociety.com/thir...
http://enenews.com/npr-affilia...
As is the Brookings Institute.
From Nature:
You hit the nail on the head, Solar installation costs less than half in Germany, see chart here:
why-german-solar-is-so-much-cheaper-than-u-s-solar-updated-study
The Brookings Institute guy is completely wrong, garbage in/garbage out AKA his inputs were all wrong.
Thoroughly debunked here:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/am...
And Here
http://www.nature.com/climate/...