Let's do this. Not because I think that off shore wind power is a good idea but because I think that this would be a good place to put a nuclear power plant.
I expect them to build this artificial island, lay the power cables, and put up the windmills, only to later have a storm come along and damage enough windmills, or some other problem, to send them into bankruptcy. At that point they'll have this island with the infrastructure for a power plant and not much else to do with it.
They show the island with a landing strip for airplanes, and facilities for bringing in cargo by sea, so I guess this island could be used for a lot of things. I don't know how big the island is planned to be, and how long of a runway it could support, but if a long enough runway could be built then it could be a place to build an airport. Japan did this. Although Japan did this for the much more pressing problem of a lack of large flat areas for an airport, a problem that Europe does not have, yet.
When it comes to concerns of a nuclear power plant being damaged by a storm like windmills there is plenty of evidence of this not being a problem. There was just a major hurricane that slammed into a nuclear power plant in Florida and it was operating through the storm. When it comes to incidents like Fukushima we've learned on how to avoid them in the future. The reactors at Fukushima were very old and not up to modern specs of safety, and had long known safety violations but was allowed to continue operating regardless. In short, don't do that again.
In the unlikely event of a meltdown then there would be no need of an evacuation beyond the island itself. So, sure, build this island. I expect them to fail only to build a nuclear power plant on the site later.
What about a nuclear reactor on an artificial island, far from any inhabited area? One with multiple electrical power links to the mainland? I have an idea on where they could build this artificial island.
Sounds like a good reason to colonize Mars to me. That is until people put up so many satellites around Mars that no one can be free from internet there either. Then we colonize Venus, and so on and so on. People will be driven to explore every rock in the solar system large enough to build a house. Once we've expended that resource people will be driven to explore other stars.
Just so they have a place to vacation that's out of reach of the internet.
About 22% of California's imported power comes from renewables
Right, California buys expensive renewable energy which reduces it's availability from the open market. They can make this claim only because they paid above market rates. Which is fine by me, I don't live in California and so their buying of renewable energy means more cheap natural gas, hydro, and nuclear energy for me. This is especially insane since if the goal is to reduce CO2 output they'd consider hydro and nuclear as "green" energy too. Solar produces more CO2 per energy output than nuclear and hydro.
How is that possible? How can solar have a larger carbon footprint than nuclear and hydro? This is because of things like the concrete anchors the solar panels sit on to keep from blowing away. Nuclear and hydro have a much larger CO2 impact from their much greater mass of concrete but they produce power day and night to offset this. Can this be improved in the future? Perhaps with lowering the CO2 released to produce concrete but then this process would also reduce the CO2 released in the concrete for the nuclear and hydro industry too. It will be hard for solar to come ahead on this.
Running the state on wind and solar power will only be possible if they keep paying a premium to buy "green" energy from other states as they use cheaper nuclear, hydro, and natural gas, to meet their needs. This might make California feel good but if the rest of the nation is using hydro, nuclear, natural gas, and probably some wind that California didn't buy then we could have lower prices AND a lower CO2 output.
Run nuclear plants as peakers -- yes, it can be done with the right design.
Yes it can, but why bother? I get to this in a bit.
Nuclear isn't renewable, but it's a hell of a lot cleaner than fossil fools.
True, just the radioactive material in coal ash should be enough to get coal plants shut down. That's if coal had to meet the same standards as nuclear for disposing of the naturally occurring uranium in the ash. But if it's safe for them to toss it in a ditch then certainly nuclear reactors can do the same?
So, why bother with nuclear as a supplier of peak demand? Let's consider that Germany discovered that for every 4 MW of wind power they need 3 MW of ready backup power. Let's be honest here and note that this is Russian natural gas for the most part. We don't have the same political ramifications for foreign natural gas in the USA as we produce sufficient quantities of it ourselves.
We use natural gas because the capital expense is relatively low, about $30/MWh installed, but the fuel costs are relatively high, but still low enough that with a 30% capacity factor it's $105/MWh. Wind and nuclear are not too far apart in capital expense, wind at $70 and nuclear at $83. Wind though has a capacity factor of about 35% and nuclear at 90%.
What happens though is that the costs for nuclear and wind do not rely on fuel, there's no fuel cost for wind and nuclear fuel cast is so small that it can realistically be ignored in the grand scheme. What keeps nuclear costs low is that this very high capital expense is offset by it's high capacity factor. I saw the math once and I forget the details on this output to cost curve but what was obvious is the less the nuclear power plant output the higher the cost.
We can run nuclear at a 30% capacity factor like natural gas but then the cost to run it isn't $100/MWh anymore, it would at least triple. Much of the costs on a nuclear power plant exist whether it runs or not, so you run it as much as is possible to make back the investment in capital as quickly as possible.
If you've got 4 GW of wind capacity, and 3 GW of natural gas capacity, then you can expect an average output of 2.5 GW or so. This works well so far because the costs average out to about $100/MWh. If you've got 4 GW of wind capacity, and 3 GW of nuclear to back it up, then try to run that at the same 2.5 GW average output to maximize wind usage, then your costs just went to $300/MWh.
Here's a more realistic outcome, you dump your capital into all nuclear. The capital costs will actually be lower than then combined wind and natural gas, but the maximum load it can support would be greater. If you have a 2.5 GW average demand then install 4 GW of nuclear and be done. This would be met with 3, 4, or 5 common reactors on the same site, or spread out to 2 or 3 sites, each backing up the other. Getting more realistic there would probably be 3 GW of nuclear and 1 GW of natural gas so that if there was a major problem with the nuclear reactors then the natural gas could be used to shutdown, cool, and monitor the reactor. This could be blackout or brownout territory but highly rare, about as common as peak demand meeting a no wind situation if there was a reliance on windmills.
Right now wind costs about 90% of nuclear power but it is unreliable. Even by spreading out the windmills and a "smart grid" wind will only produce 35% of it's installed capacity. Batteries don't change this, it only adds to the cost to gain back some reliability. The math gets complicated real quick on trying the right balance but it seems quite apparent that if there is a combination where we use current costs to compute this balance with wind and nuclear providing a majority of our electricity then wind is going to make almost non-existent contributions to keep costs low.
I probably did a real shitty job explaining this. I've seen people that studied this do a presentation and the math looks real bad for wind
Why do I think wind and solar will be unreliable by 2040? Because they rely on the wind blowing and the sun shining.
Why do I think that wind and solar will be expensive by 2040? You assumed too much. I don't know what wind and solar will cost in 20 years, and neither do these policymakers. Given that it's more expensive than nuclear now then there's a good chance that with technological development in wind, solar, and nuclear, in the next 20 years that the swiftest horse is the best bet. Maybe wind and solar will win, but right now nuclear is ahead. So build some nuclear now, and see which one is ahead in 20 years.
Most importantly is that unless we see a replacement for oil in the next 20 years this ban on oil will not stand. I suppose they might be stubborn and hold the oil ban as the lights go out, planes are grounded, and people generally freeze and starve to death. If there is a replacement we'll likely see a transition in full swing in 20 years. It's not likely that oil can be replaced that quickly. It took a century for steam to completely replace sail in commercial shipping.
Coal power shares a lot of strengths and weaknesses with nuclear. Nuclear power is "green" power. If batteries prove themselves as a means to address the weaknesses with coal power then they've proven themselves to address the weaknesses with nuclear.
It took me a while but I've come to realize that it's going to take more than some batteries to make wind and solar competitive. We just saw these batteries react well to an outage of a very large coal plant.
I can hear it now, what if we have another Fukushima disaster? Then we have the reserve batteries to keep the grid stable and keep the cooling pumps running at the nuclear power plant. Any arguments on things like the batteries not being big enough, too expensive, also subject to the flooding, or whatever, would also apply as if they were used to manage off shore windmills that just got taken out by a tsunami. The difference is that a nuclear power plant would be in a reinforced concrete dome while the windmills are out in the wind and waves. The nuclear power plant would likely be restored to operation in hours or days. The vast field of twisted up windmills would take much longer to repair.
Batteries work as backup for coal. We just saw it happen. That means it can backup nuclear. Batteries can backup anything. So then it comes down to things like CO2 output and costs. I've seen the numbers, they aren't hard to find. Nuclear is about the same price as hydro, cheaper than solar in any form, and cheaper than off shore wind. The only thing "green" that's cheaper than nuclear is onshore wind, and even that makes some assumptions on location. When it comes to CO2 output nuclear produce less CO2 per energy produced than solar, and on par with wind and hydro. These differences are small, I'll admit, but if the claim is that nuclear is not "green" then I've got sources that tell me otherwise.
It's kind of like how people will claim that nuclear power will never be safe enough or inexpensive enough to work. Which is odd since even Japan seems convinced nuclear power is something they want to keep using. If it works in Japan then why can't it be made to work in the USA? Especially in places far from places that might experience a tsunami?
Any publicly stated government goal that is more than one election out is bullshit. JFK did make the claim of going to the moon "by the end of this decade" and people believed him because there was a good chance he'd still be in office 8 years later. These knuckleheads are making a promise that is 20 years out. I'm going to take a leap here and suspect that these policymakers are like ours in the USA and are predominately... shall we say, "senior citizens". Not only are these people unlikely to still be in office to enforce this policy but I suspect that half of them will be dead.
I laugh at politicians making claims of having a plan for 10 years out, much less 20. Tell me your plan for next year. They won't tell me their plan for next year because that's something that they might actually be held against. Instead they talk of a plan to reduce the debt in 10 years and stop the seas from rising in 100.
You know something, France? You've done a great job in reducing carbon output with all those nuclear reactors, how about you build some more? That's going to do more for reducing your carbon output than anything else.
Also, banning something without a plan to offer a replacement is just asking for problems. We've seen these coal bans blow up in faces all over the world. It turns out that trying to replace a reliable and cheap energy source with unreliable and expensive wind and solar doesn't work all that well. What makes you think that this oil ban will go over any better? If you want to see oil go away then offer something better and it will go away on it's own. The stone age didn't end for lack of rocks.
But from an objective standpoint an increase in penis size and decrease in intelligence in humans cannot be argued to represent an evolutionary advancement.
Objectively speaking there is no such thing as "evolutionary advancement" since advancement implies some form of goal that evolution is leading towards, and that we know what that goal is.
I believe you misunderstand how "suitability" works in evolution. Being "more suitable" does not mean "more intelligent". Lots of things determine suitability, and intelligence is just one aspect.
Stefan Molyneaux (I think that's how it's spelled) had a series of videos on this a year or three ago. He's had a few more since. The best one in the last few months was with Dr. Jordan Peterson (also not sure on spelling).
I keep hearing about "Flynn Effect" when IQ comes up so I rewatched some interviews Stef did with Dr. James Flynn and some of his supporters and detractors. Even Dr. Flynn admits that there is a genetic limit to intelligence and that the testing we have is highly accurate across cultures. The debate is if the IQ of a person or population is 50/50 upbringing and genetics or more like 80% genetics and 20% upbringing.
Even if the Flynn Effect accounts for 50% intelligence there's still evidence that the best we can do is raise IQ scores by maybe 20 points. That might seem like a lot but there are entire nations with an average IQ below 70. Improved nutrition might add 10 points, improved childhood environment might add another 10 points, but you'll still have a national average IQ of maybe 85 or 90. The average IQ score of an American high school graduate is 105.
With an IQ of 75 we can expect a 50-50 chance of reaching the 9th grade. Those with graduate degrees, like MD, JD, DDS, MBA, or what not, have an average IQ of 120. What does that mean for a nation with an average IQ of 85? 75? Or even 65? There's near certainty that there are people able to achieve being dentists, pharmacists, surgeons, lawyers, engineers, and so forth. The problem is that such people will be such a small portion of the population that they cannot meet the needs of the nation. Each surgeon needs technicians and nurses. A judge needs prosecutors and bailiffs.
Assuming the IQ of these nations can be raised by education and medicine then we need the people intelligent enough to teach and provide health care to stay in those nations. Importing these intelligent people to the USA leaves them at a far greater loss than we in the USA could gain. If they are coming to the USA then we could at least test their IQ so that their coming here doesn't lower the IQ of both nations.
I'm pretty sure China is beating us where they are beating us (which I believe is not everything) is because they have a nation with a national IQ of about 105 and staying there as immigrants must be returning Chinese nationals or people with enough intelligence and money that they will not be a burden on the state. In the USA we've got a national IQ of about 98 and we'll let any fucker stay in that can jump the border and have a kid before getting caught.
I don't care what anyone says, these people are not coming here for the jobs, schools, and health care. They are coming for the welfare, publicly funded schools, and government subsidized medicine. And I'm not so sure about the schools.
Even borderline third world nations like Mexico will jail people for jumping the border. They don't care if you've had a kid born there. If you don't have enough money to bribe the police then you will be imprisoned. If you do bribe the police then they might let you stay but that might just be enough to buy you a ride to the closest border rather than a prison sentence.
If we're going to blame anything on American HR departments then it's following "sanctuary city" policies of not checking employment documents. They might also look for "diversity" rather than actual work ethic, skill, intelligence, and education. China doesn't have an immigration problem, maybe a few hundred thousand out of over a billion. They also don't have a "diversity" problem, everyone working (officially at least, there's off the books people that work on "visitor" visas) is an ethnic Chinese.
If we want to stop getting beaten by China then we need to kick out the border jumpers. If they want in then they need to show that they have something to offer. Having a kid in the USA should not automatically mean the parent can stay. They child is free to stay, as well as free to go with the parent. The parent will have to go and if anyone complains about "breaking up families" then that's the fault of the parent. This is no different than "breaking up families" for parents sent to prison. It's sad and damaging to the family but if we do not punish anti-social behavior then we simply get more and more of it. This breeding of criminal behavior is bad on families too. Especially when we have illegal aliens driving drunk and/or without a license and killing people.
I hear these cries of "but they didn't break the law!" They broke the law when they jumped the border. They broke the law when they took a job. They broke the law when they sent their kids to school. They broke the law by driving without a license. Best chance we got to keep them from killing someone is to catch them for a petty crime and have them deported before some SJW police chief lets them go based on their "sanctuary city" policy. They need to be charged as an accessory to a crime for doing that, and the cities need to lose federal police funds. They've been getting that money on the promise of cooperation on enforcing federal law. If they don't hand over illegal immigrants then they are not holding up their end of the deal.
We'll catch up to China and surpass them as soon as we close our borders to these leaches.
I remember taking a test for an electrician apprenticeship. They didn't test anything on knowledge of electrical code or Ohm's law. I remember reading an interesting story on the history of road building and having to answer questions about it. I think there was a pattern match portion and a mathematics portion but I don't remember them as well. It was an intelligence test, no doubt.
I took an intelligence test for the US Army, called the ASVAB or AFQT, scored in the 99th percentile too. Every branch of the US military has been doing this for 100 years or so.
I had a job interview for working at a call center to support sales people at a large advertising company. The intelligence test was a bit more oriented specifically for the job at hand but still an intelligence test. I had to listen to some prerecorded verbal instruction, and answer questions on how to respond. I didn't do as well as I wished and felt some of the questions were a matter of opinion or company policy than a purely logical action. There was a typing test, not precisely a test of intelligence again but it was certainly geared to separating those with an attention to detail and speed from those that did not. I thought I failed since I had not met the minimum score given at the beginning but I guess a lot of people must have failed too, with even lower scores.
I took a test called something like "National Career Readiness Assessment" that was paid for by the state employment service. If you registered in their database for a job they wanted you to take this test. I scored in the 90th percentile only because they take the lowest score of the three tests to give your rating, my average would have put me in the 95 or higher percentile.
In other interviews I was asked questions on logic, nothing formal really, but they wanted to see how the applicants would act when presented with a problem. I've interviewed with companies famous for their logic puzzle interviews, which left me with the thought of this being a very poor method of assessing an applicant. My suspicions were verified not because I wasn't called back for and interview but how an article was written on how such an interview process can be a turn off for intelligent people. So maybe I was too smart, maybe I was too dim, either way I was not terribly upset for not being called back.
The IQ test has long been replaced with high school diplomas and college degrees. These are very flawed intelligence tests unless some care is made to compare where the diplomas and degrees came from, topics studied, and to some extent the scores achieved. I suspect employers have seen the flaws in using formal schooling and grades to filter out applicants, which is why so many have returned to "employment assessments" instead. Colleges have been caught inflating grades and high schools have been known to graduate people for merely showing up for the entire four years.
You see they can ban an IQ test but they can't (yet) ban "employment assessments".
*A lot of exposure to the 50s-60s media which made nuclear scary and dangerous.
I'm pretty sure this fear is more recent. I remember watching re-runs of Thunderbirds and other sci-fi from the 1950s and 1960s, nuclear was thought of as generally good. In Thunderbirds all the heroes' vehicles were nuclear powered. Nuclear became a problem in the 1970s, the 1979 movie China Syndrome is iconic in part for this shift in the public's view of nuclear power.
*A lack of understanding about how nuclear weapons and nuclear power are different. It's not like we teach that shit in school.
I believe you mean public school. I learned about how nuclear weapons and nuclear power is different.
*An overly cautious government which won't allow breeder reactors, and which takes a long time to approve newer, safer designs. This means older less safe designs, and way more spent fuel.
This is just a restatement of the fear of nuclear weapons and how people don't understand the difference between "reactor grade" and "weapon grade". I see your point though. No one should fear breeder reactors if there is a basic understanding that not all breeder reactors are equal. We have used breeder reactors to make weapons but that does not mean all breeder reactors can make weapons.
*Radiation is invisible but a known killer. That makes it scary. Lack of understanding about it doesn't help.
Yes, agreed, again just an issue of education.
*Nuclear power plants take up a lot of space, are giant structures, an come with exclusionary zones and mandatory warning areas with monthly tests. NIMBY isn't entirely unreasonable in that regard.
How is this different than any other utility scale power plant? NIMBY applies to solar power, wind power, hydro, and so on.
That said I don't agree with the fear over nucear. Lets get some pebble bed reactors or other new designs up and running, and take care of all our baseline needs.
If we can agree on the solution then we can agree to disagree on the problem. If we're backed into a corner of no coal and no nuclear then we're going to see problems with energy real quick. I've seen the data, no nuclear and no coal means the lights go out.
That will teach me to ask more than one question in a post. The real question I want answered you didn't even touch. So, I'll try again.
Why are people so concerned about CAGW and yet oppose nuclear power? Science says it's the best solution we have.
For people that claim to be so "scientific" they do look like idiots for opposing the development of nuclear energy. I hear the same arguments over and over.
Nuclear power is dangerous! No energy source is safe. What we see through the data is that based on energy produced and people killed nuclear power is, by a VERY large margin, the safest energy source we have.
Nuclear power is expensive! The data shows that nuclear power is no more expensive than solar. We'll subsidize solar to bring down the apparent costs but that's still money removed from the economy, that cost is still there but we just pay it through taxes instead of on a utility bill. If we can afford to pay for solar power to save humanity then we can afford nuclear power. Any claims that solar will get cheaper in time with advancements in technology and economy of scale also apply to nuclear power.
But BOMBS! Nuclear power has as much to do with nuclear weapons as gasoline has to napalm and diesel fuel to ANFO. In fact it is far easier to turn fossil fuels into weapons than it is to turn nuclear material into weapons. Also, what better way to dispose of existing nuclear weapons than to use the weapon cores for energy? We can bust up the weapons and lock the plutonium away but it's still there for someone to use in a weapon later. The only way to destroy it is to bombard it with neutrons. This is a genie we cannot put back in the bottle. People know nuclear weapons are possible and denying nuclear power to ourselves out of this irrational fear does nothing to prevent someone else developing nuclear weapons on their own if they are motivated enough to develop them.
To deny nuclear power as a solution to the CAGW problem is denying science. Why do these people deny science?
Producers are flaring the gas off near producing fields rather than piping it to market.
I remember hearing something about long ago it was common practice for oil and gas companies to use this gas to run generators. The refineries and drills needed electricity to run so it made sense to burn this gas if they could to make electricity since it was not economical to do anything else with it. This became the norm to the point that these oil and gas companies has a surplus of electricity. These companies wanted to make the best of their resources so they made deals with utilities and businesses nearby to sell them this excess electrical capacity. Since this was basically a side business for them they sold the electricity cheap as it made little difference to them in the grand scheme since their real money was made on the oil and gas. The people in the business of making electricity didn't like this.
Someone decided that they should complain to the government, because competition is bad for their business, no matter how small it might be.
So the government came in and told the oil and gas companies that they had to make a choice, sell petroleum products or sell electricity. For some reason the government also thought competition was bad, or something else I'm not clear on. Well for the oil and gas companies they knew they could not compete with coal if they had to burn all their oil and gas for electricity, so they stopped selling electricity. There was still the problem of having flammable gasses they couldn't do anything really useful with if they couldn't burn it on site for electricity. So they just burned it in flares.
Back then this practice of flaring off gasses wasn't considered the problem it is today but, as far as I know, the rules on burning it for electricity to sell is still in place. Government created this practice of flaring off gasses by making rules that effectively banned the use of it to produce electricity for sale. Sure, they aren't barred from bringing in generators to burn this gas for electricity they use themselves but that costs money. It was only economic to have on site generators if they were allowed to sell excess capacity.
We'll have laws mandating the utilities to buy excess generation capacity from people with wind and solar, because that's good for the environment or something. We have laws mandating that oil and gas companies cannot sell their excess electrical generation capacity because... it's bad for the coal industry? This effective ban is certainly bad for the environment.
Do you think these people want to just flare off those gasses if they could sell it some how? I'm pretty sure they don't. I think they'd rather use it to make electricity and sell that on the grid. Can't do that though, that's against the rules.
You want them to stop flaring these gasses? Then rewrite the rules so they can make money from it instead.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's do this. Not because I think that off shore wind power is a good idea but because I think that this would be a good place to put a nuclear power plant.
I expect them to build this artificial island, lay the power cables, and put up the windmills, only to later have a storm come along and damage enough windmills, or some other problem, to send them into bankruptcy. At that point they'll have this island with the infrastructure for a power plant and not much else to do with it.
They show the island with a landing strip for airplanes, and facilities for bringing in cargo by sea, so I guess this island could be used for a lot of things. I don't know how big the island is planned to be, and how long of a runway it could support, but if a long enough runway could be built then it could be a place to build an airport. Japan did this. Although Japan did this for the much more pressing problem of a lack of large flat areas for an airport, a problem that Europe does not have, yet.
When it comes to concerns of a nuclear power plant being damaged by a storm like windmills there is plenty of evidence of this not being a problem. There was just a major hurricane that slammed into a nuclear power plant in Florida and it was operating through the storm. When it comes to incidents like Fukushima we've learned on how to avoid them in the future. The reactors at Fukushima were very old and not up to modern specs of safety, and had long known safety violations but was allowed to continue operating regardless. In short, don't do that again.
In the unlikely event of a meltdown then there would be no need of an evacuation beyond the island itself. So, sure, build this island. I expect them to fail only to build a nuclear power plant on the site later.
What about a nuclear reactor on an artificial island, far from any inhabited area? One with multiple electrical power links to the mainland? I have an idea on where they could build this artificial island.
"How did they solve the Don Quixote problem? ;)"
Water. Lots and lots of water.
Sounds like a good reason to colonize Mars to me. That is until people put up so many satellites around Mars that no one can be free from internet there either. Then we colonize Venus, and so on and so on. People will be driven to explore every rock in the solar system large enough to build a house. Once we've expended that resource people will be driven to explore other stars.
Just so they have a place to vacation that's out of reach of the internet.
Get a lot of stuffed cows and put them into orbit.
Just to be clear that would be the female of the species, because if it were male cattle then that would be a payload of bull.
Racists!
About 22% of California's imported power comes from renewables
Right, California buys expensive renewable energy which reduces it's availability from the open market. They can make this claim only because they paid above market rates. Which is fine by me, I don't live in California and so their buying of renewable energy means more cheap natural gas, hydro, and nuclear energy for me. This is especially insane since if the goal is to reduce CO2 output they'd consider hydro and nuclear as "green" energy too. Solar produces more CO2 per energy output than nuclear and hydro.
How is that possible? How can solar have a larger carbon footprint than nuclear and hydro? This is because of things like the concrete anchors the solar panels sit on to keep from blowing away. Nuclear and hydro have a much larger CO2 impact from their much greater mass of concrete but they produce power day and night to offset this. Can this be improved in the future? Perhaps with lowering the CO2 released to produce concrete but then this process would also reduce the CO2 released in the concrete for the nuclear and hydro industry too. It will be hard for solar to come ahead on this.
Running the state on wind and solar power will only be possible if they keep paying a premium to buy "green" energy from other states as they use cheaper nuclear, hydro, and natural gas, to meet their needs. This might make California feel good but if the rest of the nation is using hydro, nuclear, natural gas, and probably some wind that California didn't buy then we could have lower prices AND a lower CO2 output.
Run nuclear plants as peakers -- yes, it can be done with the right design.
Yes it can, but why bother? I get to this in a bit.
Nuclear isn't renewable, but it's a hell of a lot cleaner than fossil fools.
True, just the radioactive material in coal ash should be enough to get coal plants shut down. That's if coal had to meet the same standards as nuclear for disposing of the naturally occurring uranium in the ash. But if it's safe for them to toss it in a ditch then certainly nuclear reactors can do the same?
So, why bother with nuclear as a supplier of peak demand? Let's consider that Germany discovered that for every 4 MW of wind power they need 3 MW of ready backup power. Let's be honest here and note that this is Russian natural gas for the most part. We don't have the same political ramifications for foreign natural gas in the USA as we produce sufficient quantities of it ourselves.
We use natural gas because the capital expense is relatively low, about $30/MWh installed, but the fuel costs are relatively high, but still low enough that with a 30% capacity factor it's $105/MWh. Wind and nuclear are not too far apart in capital expense, wind at $70 and nuclear at $83. Wind though has a capacity factor of about 35% and nuclear at 90%.
What happens though is that the costs for nuclear and wind do not rely on fuel, there's no fuel cost for wind and nuclear fuel cast is so small that it can realistically be ignored in the grand scheme. What keeps nuclear costs low is that this very high capital expense is offset by it's high capacity factor. I saw the math once and I forget the details on this output to cost curve but what was obvious is the less the nuclear power plant output the higher the cost.
We can run nuclear at a 30% capacity factor like natural gas but then the cost to run it isn't $100/MWh anymore, it would at least triple. Much of the costs on a nuclear power plant exist whether it runs or not, so you run it as much as is possible to make back the investment in capital as quickly as possible.
If you've got 4 GW of wind capacity, and 3 GW of natural gas capacity, then you can expect an average output of 2.5 GW or so. This works well so far because the costs average out to about $100/MWh. If you've got 4 GW of wind capacity, and 3 GW of nuclear to back it up, then try to run that at the same 2.5 GW average output to maximize wind usage, then your costs just went to $300/MWh.
Here's a more realistic outcome, you dump your capital into all nuclear. The capital costs will actually be lower than then combined wind and natural gas, but the maximum load it can support would be greater. If you have a 2.5 GW average demand then install 4 GW of nuclear and be done. This would be met with 3, 4, or 5 common reactors on the same site, or spread out to 2 or 3 sites, each backing up the other. Getting more realistic there would probably be 3 GW of nuclear and 1 GW of natural gas so that if there was a major problem with the nuclear reactors then the natural gas could be used to shutdown, cool, and monitor the reactor. This could be blackout or brownout territory but highly rare, about as common as peak demand meeting a no wind situation if there was a reliance on windmills.
Right now wind costs about 90% of nuclear power but it is unreliable. Even by spreading out the windmills and a "smart grid" wind will only produce 35% of it's installed capacity. Batteries don't change this, it only adds to the cost to gain back some reliability. The math gets complicated real quick on trying the right balance but it seems quite apparent that if there is a combination where we use current costs to compute this balance with wind and nuclear providing a majority of our electricity then wind is going to make almost non-existent contributions to keep costs low.
I probably did a real shitty job explaining this. I've seen people that studied this do a presentation and the math looks real bad for wind
Why do I think wind and solar will be unreliable by 2040? Because they rely on the wind blowing and the sun shining.
Why do I think that wind and solar will be expensive by 2040? You assumed too much. I don't know what wind and solar will cost in 20 years, and neither do these policymakers. Given that it's more expensive than nuclear now then there's a good chance that with technological development in wind, solar, and nuclear, in the next 20 years that the swiftest horse is the best bet. Maybe wind and solar will win, but right now nuclear is ahead. So build some nuclear now, and see which one is ahead in 20 years.
Most importantly is that unless we see a replacement for oil in the next 20 years this ban on oil will not stand. I suppose they might be stubborn and hold the oil ban as the lights go out, planes are grounded, and people generally freeze and starve to death. If there is a replacement we'll likely see a transition in full swing in 20 years. It's not likely that oil can be replaced that quickly. It took a century for steam to completely replace sail in commercial shipping.
There is no radioactive waste that's a radioactive hazard for millennia. If you believe otherwise then please list the isotopes that pose this risk.
Coal power shares a lot of strengths and weaknesses with nuclear. Nuclear power is "green" power. If batteries prove themselves as a means to address the weaknesses with coal power then they've proven themselves to address the weaknesses with nuclear.
It took me a while but I've come to realize that it's going to take more than some batteries to make wind and solar competitive. We just saw these batteries react well to an outage of a very large coal plant.
I can hear it now, what if we have another Fukushima disaster? Then we have the reserve batteries to keep the grid stable and keep the cooling pumps running at the nuclear power plant. Any arguments on things like the batteries not being big enough, too expensive, also subject to the flooding, or whatever, would also apply as if they were used to manage off shore windmills that just got taken out by a tsunami. The difference is that a nuclear power plant would be in a reinforced concrete dome while the windmills are out in the wind and waves. The nuclear power plant would likely be restored to operation in hours or days. The vast field of twisted up windmills would take much longer to repair.
Batteries work as backup for coal. We just saw it happen. That means it can backup nuclear. Batteries can backup anything. So then it comes down to things like CO2 output and costs. I've seen the numbers, they aren't hard to find. Nuclear is about the same price as hydro, cheaper than solar in any form, and cheaper than off shore wind. The only thing "green" that's cheaper than nuclear is onshore wind, and even that makes some assumptions on location. When it comes to CO2 output nuclear produce less CO2 per energy produced than solar, and on par with wind and hydro. These differences are small, I'll admit, but if the claim is that nuclear is not "green" then I've got sources that tell me otherwise.
Because if you can only run this plant when there is excess power generating capacity then it's not likely to be profitable.
It's kind of like how people will claim that nuclear power will never be safe enough or inexpensive enough to work. Which is odd since even Japan seems convinced nuclear power is something they want to keep using. If it works in Japan then why can't it be made to work in the USA? Especially in places far from places that might experience a tsunami?
Any publicly stated government goal that is more than one election out is bullshit. JFK did make the claim of going to the moon "by the end of this decade" and people believed him because there was a good chance he'd still be in office 8 years later. These knuckleheads are making a promise that is 20 years out. I'm going to take a leap here and suspect that these policymakers are like ours in the USA and are predominately... shall we say, "senior citizens". Not only are these people unlikely to still be in office to enforce this policy but I suspect that half of them will be dead.
I laugh at politicians making claims of having a plan for 10 years out, much less 20. Tell me your plan for next year. They won't tell me their plan for next year because that's something that they might actually be held against. Instead they talk of a plan to reduce the debt in 10 years and stop the seas from rising in 100.
You know something, France? You've done a great job in reducing carbon output with all those nuclear reactors, how about you build some more? That's going to do more for reducing your carbon output than anything else.
Also, banning something without a plan to offer a replacement is just asking for problems. We've seen these coal bans blow up in faces all over the world. It turns out that trying to replace a reliable and cheap energy source with unreliable and expensive wind and solar doesn't work all that well. What makes you think that this oil ban will go over any better? If you want to see oil go away then offer something better and it will go away on it's own. The stone age didn't end for lack of rocks.
Facts don't care about your feelings.
But from an objective standpoint an increase in penis size and decrease in intelligence in humans cannot be argued to represent an evolutionary advancement.
Objectively speaking there is no such thing as "evolutionary advancement" since advancement implies some form of goal that evolution is leading towards, and that we know what that goal is.
I believe you misunderstand how "suitability" works in evolution. Being "more suitable" does not mean "more intelligent". Lots of things determine suitability, and intelligence is just one aspect.
Stefan Molyneaux (I think that's how it's spelled) had a series of videos on this a year or three ago. He's had a few more since. The best one in the last few months was with Dr. Jordan Peterson (also not sure on spelling).
I keep hearing about "Flynn Effect" when IQ comes up so I rewatched some interviews Stef did with Dr. James Flynn and some of his supporters and detractors. Even Dr. Flynn admits that there is a genetic limit to intelligence and that the testing we have is highly accurate across cultures. The debate is if the IQ of a person or population is 50/50 upbringing and genetics or more like 80% genetics and 20% upbringing.
Even if the Flynn Effect accounts for 50% intelligence there's still evidence that the best we can do is raise IQ scores by maybe 20 points. That might seem like a lot but there are entire nations with an average IQ below 70. Improved nutrition might add 10 points, improved childhood environment might add another 10 points, but you'll still have a national average IQ of maybe 85 or 90. The average IQ score of an American high school graduate is 105.
With an IQ of 75 we can expect a 50-50 chance of reaching the 9th grade. Those with graduate degrees, like MD, JD, DDS, MBA, or what not, have an average IQ of 120. What does that mean for a nation with an average IQ of 85? 75? Or even 65? There's near certainty that there are people able to achieve being dentists, pharmacists, surgeons, lawyers, engineers, and so forth. The problem is that such people will be such a small portion of the population that they cannot meet the needs of the nation. Each surgeon needs technicians and nurses. A judge needs prosecutors and bailiffs.
Assuming the IQ of these nations can be raised by education and medicine then we need the people intelligent enough to teach and provide health care to stay in those nations. Importing these intelligent people to the USA leaves them at a far greater loss than we in the USA could gain. If they are coming to the USA then we could at least test their IQ so that their coming here doesn't lower the IQ of both nations.
I'm pretty sure China is beating us where they are beating us (which I believe is not everything) is because they have a nation with a national IQ of about 105 and staying there as immigrants must be returning Chinese nationals or people with enough intelligence and money that they will not be a burden on the state. In the USA we've got a national IQ of about 98 and we'll let any fucker stay in that can jump the border and have a kid before getting caught.
I don't care what anyone says, these people are not coming here for the jobs, schools, and health care. They are coming for the welfare, publicly funded schools, and government subsidized medicine. And I'm not so sure about the schools.
Even borderline third world nations like Mexico will jail people for jumping the border. They don't care if you've had a kid born there. If you don't have enough money to bribe the police then you will be imprisoned. If you do bribe the police then they might let you stay but that might just be enough to buy you a ride to the closest border rather than a prison sentence.
If we're going to blame anything on American HR departments then it's following "sanctuary city" policies of not checking employment documents. They might also look for "diversity" rather than actual work ethic, skill, intelligence, and education. China doesn't have an immigration problem, maybe a few hundred thousand out of over a billion. They also don't have a "diversity" problem, everyone working (officially at least, there's off the books people that work on "visitor" visas) is an ethnic Chinese.
If we want to stop getting beaten by China then we need to kick out the border jumpers. If they want in then they need to show that they have something to offer. Having a kid in the USA should not automatically mean the parent can stay. They child is free to stay, as well as free to go with the parent. The parent will have to go and if anyone complains about "breaking up families" then that's the fault of the parent. This is no different than "breaking up families" for parents sent to prison. It's sad and damaging to the family but if we do not punish anti-social behavior then we simply get more and more of it. This breeding of criminal behavior is bad on families too. Especially when we have illegal aliens driving drunk and/or without a license and killing people.
I hear these cries of "but they didn't break the law!" They broke the law when they jumped the border. They broke the law when they took a job. They broke the law when they sent their kids to school. They broke the law by driving without a license. Best chance we got to keep them from killing someone is to catch them for a petty crime and have them deported before some SJW police chief lets them go based on their "sanctuary city" policy. They need to be charged as an accessory to a crime for doing that, and the cities need to lose federal police funds. They've been getting that money on the promise of cooperation on enforcing federal law. If they don't hand over illegal immigrants then they are not holding up their end of the deal.
We'll catch up to China and surpass them as soon as we close our borders to these leaches.
Who are "they"?
I remember taking a test for an electrician apprenticeship. They didn't test anything on knowledge of electrical code or Ohm's law. I remember reading an interesting story on the history of road building and having to answer questions about it. I think there was a pattern match portion and a mathematics portion but I don't remember them as well. It was an intelligence test, no doubt.
I took an intelligence test for the US Army, called the ASVAB or AFQT, scored in the 99th percentile too. Every branch of the US military has been doing this for 100 years or so.
I had a job interview for working at a call center to support sales people at a large advertising company. The intelligence test was a bit more oriented specifically for the job at hand but still an intelligence test. I had to listen to some prerecorded verbal instruction, and answer questions on how to respond. I didn't do as well as I wished and felt some of the questions were a matter of opinion or company policy than a purely logical action. There was a typing test, not precisely a test of intelligence again but it was certainly geared to separating those with an attention to detail and speed from those that did not. I thought I failed since I had not met the minimum score given at the beginning but I guess a lot of people must have failed too, with even lower scores.
I took a test called something like "National Career Readiness Assessment" that was paid for by the state employment service. If you registered in their database for a job they wanted you to take this test. I scored in the 90th percentile only because they take the lowest score of the three tests to give your rating, my average would have put me in the 95 or higher percentile.
In other interviews I was asked questions on logic, nothing formal really, but they wanted to see how the applicants would act when presented with a problem. I've interviewed with companies famous for their logic puzzle interviews, which left me with the thought of this being a very poor method of assessing an applicant. My suspicions were verified not because I wasn't called back for and interview but how an article was written on how such an interview process can be a turn off for intelligent people. So maybe I was too smart, maybe I was too dim, either way I was not terribly upset for not being called back.
The IQ test has long been replaced with high school diplomas and college degrees. These are very flawed intelligence tests unless some care is made to compare where the diplomas and degrees came from, topics studied, and to some extent the scores achieved. I suspect employers have seen the flaws in using formal schooling and grades to filter out applicants, which is why so many have returned to "employment assessments" instead. Colleges have been caught inflating grades and high schools have been known to graduate people for merely showing up for the entire four years.
You see they can ban an IQ test but they can't (yet) ban "employment assessments".
*A lot of exposure to the 50s-60s media which made nuclear scary and dangerous.
I'm pretty sure this fear is more recent. I remember watching re-runs of Thunderbirds and other sci-fi from the 1950s and 1960s, nuclear was thought of as generally good. In Thunderbirds all the heroes' vehicles were nuclear powered. Nuclear became a problem in the 1970s, the 1979 movie China Syndrome is iconic in part for this shift in the public's view of nuclear power.
*A lack of understanding about how nuclear weapons and nuclear power are different. It's not like we teach that shit in school.
I believe you mean public school. I learned about how nuclear weapons and nuclear power is different.
*An overly cautious government which won't allow breeder reactors, and which takes a long time to approve newer, safer designs. This means older less safe designs, and way more spent fuel.
This is just a restatement of the fear of nuclear weapons and how people don't understand the difference between "reactor grade" and "weapon grade". I see your point though. No one should fear breeder reactors if there is a basic understanding that not all breeder reactors are equal. We have used breeder reactors to make weapons but that does not mean all breeder reactors can make weapons.
*Radiation is invisible but a known killer. That makes it scary. Lack of understanding about it doesn't help.
Yes, agreed, again just an issue of education.
*Nuclear power plants take up a lot of space, are giant structures, an come with exclusionary zones and mandatory warning areas with monthly tests. NIMBY isn't entirely unreasonable in that regard.
How is this different than any other utility scale power plant? NIMBY applies to solar power, wind power, hydro, and so on.
That said I don't agree with the fear over nucear. Lets get some pebble bed reactors or other new designs up and running, and take care of all our baseline needs.
If we can agree on the solution then we can agree to disagree on the problem. If we're backed into a corner of no coal and no nuclear then we're going to see problems with energy real quick. I've seen the data, no nuclear and no coal means the lights go out.
That will teach me to ask more than one question in a post. The real question I want answered you didn't even touch. So, I'll try again.
Why are people so concerned about CAGW and yet oppose nuclear power? Science says it's the best solution we have.
For people that claim to be so "scientific" they do look like idiots for opposing the development of nuclear energy. I hear the same arguments over and over.
Nuclear power is dangerous!
No energy source is safe. What we see through the data is that based on energy produced and people killed nuclear power is, by a VERY large margin, the safest energy source we have.
Nuclear power is expensive!
The data shows that nuclear power is no more expensive than solar. We'll subsidize solar to bring down the apparent costs but that's still money removed from the economy, that cost is still there but we just pay it through taxes instead of on a utility bill. If we can afford to pay for solar power to save humanity then we can afford nuclear power. Any claims that solar will get cheaper in time with advancements in technology and economy of scale also apply to nuclear power.
But BOMBS!
Nuclear power has as much to do with nuclear weapons as gasoline has to napalm and diesel fuel to ANFO. In fact it is far easier to turn fossil fuels into weapons than it is to turn nuclear material into weapons. Also, what better way to dispose of existing nuclear weapons than to use the weapon cores for energy? We can bust up the weapons and lock the plutonium away but it's still there for someone to use in a weapon later. The only way to destroy it is to bombard it with neutrons. This is a genie we cannot put back in the bottle. People know nuclear weapons are possible and denying nuclear power to ourselves out of this irrational fear does nothing to prevent someone else developing nuclear weapons on their own if they are motivated enough to develop them.
To deny nuclear power as a solution to the CAGW problem is denying science. Why do these people deny science?
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I believe we have a winner!
Maybe a little longer for Trump - his hands are really tiny. :-)
No, they just look tiny on someone 6' 4", 250 pounds, and with a huge.... ego.
The rumors of buying smaller pens at the Oval Office for him are just that, a rumor. They are actually crayons.
Producers are flaring the gas off near producing fields rather than piping it to market.
I remember hearing something about long ago it was common practice for oil and gas companies to use this gas to run generators. The refineries and drills needed electricity to run so it made sense to burn this gas if they could to make electricity since it was not economical to do anything else with it. This became the norm to the point that these oil and gas companies has a surplus of electricity. These companies wanted to make the best of their resources so they made deals with utilities and businesses nearby to sell them this excess electrical capacity. Since this was basically a side business for them they sold the electricity cheap as it made little difference to them in the grand scheme since their real money was made on the oil and gas. The people in the business of making electricity didn't like this.
Someone decided that they should complain to the government, because competition is bad for their business, no matter how small it might be.
So the government came in and told the oil and gas companies that they had to make a choice, sell petroleum products or sell electricity. For some reason the government also thought competition was bad, or something else I'm not clear on. Well for the oil and gas companies they knew they could not compete with coal if they had to burn all their oil and gas for electricity, so they stopped selling electricity. There was still the problem of having flammable gasses they couldn't do anything really useful with if they couldn't burn it on site for electricity. So they just burned it in flares.
Back then this practice of flaring off gasses wasn't considered the problem it is today but, as far as I know, the rules on burning it for electricity to sell is still in place. Government created this practice of flaring off gasses by making rules that effectively banned the use of it to produce electricity for sale. Sure, they aren't barred from bringing in generators to burn this gas for electricity they use themselves but that costs money. It was only economic to have on site generators if they were allowed to sell excess capacity.
We'll have laws mandating the utilities to buy excess generation capacity from people with wind and solar, because that's good for the environment or something. We have laws mandating that oil and gas companies cannot sell their excess electrical generation capacity because... it's bad for the coal industry? This effective ban is certainly bad for the environment.
Do you think these people want to just flare off those gasses if they could sell it some how? I'm pretty sure they don't. I think they'd rather use it to make electricity and sell that on the grid. Can't do that though, that's against the rules.
You want them to stop flaring these gasses? Then rewrite the rules so they can make money from it instead.