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Aren't part of the extremely high costs for nuclear power from politically motivated regulations for the design, construction, and operation of plants that had the intent of adding so much expensive red tape it would make nuclear power too expensive to build?
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Apr 30, 2015 00:42
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blacksun posted:without much difficulty 
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Apr 30, 2015 00:50
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Morbus posted:And that is totally disregarding the fact that many if not most existing nuclear plants will have to be decommissioned between now and 2030. Personally I see this as an insurmountable problem without unrealistically decisive and sweeping government intervention. If you have a rosier picture to paint, please chime in so I can sleep at night. The rest of your post is pretty good but the reality is actually a rosier picture, see (page 11): http://scientech.cwfc.com/company/spokes/pdf/cnpp_2013.pdf Less than 1/3 of existing reactors will have their operating licenses expire before 2030 and I'd bet most of them will push for renewal. We certainly won't be seeing "most" of our nuclear capacity go offline in the next 15 years. Actually the above document is filled with good information about our current nuclear fleet and current license applications/builds, including information about reactors abroad that are operating or being constructed.
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Apr 30, 2015 00:51
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Please go on and tell me how renewables won't do poo poo in the U.S. and can't be used for baseload. I'll be waiting here.
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Apr 30, 2015 00:56
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CommieGIR posted:The Green Party and groups like Greenpeace do the most damage, that and private enterprises that fail to heed warnings like TEPCO. The 1980s did a LOT of damage to the Nuclear Power movement. Is Greenpeace the reason why the EPR is 15 years behind schedule? Do the experts at the NRC just need to take basic nuclear physics so that they can approve a design in less than 7-10 years? Is the Coal and Oil propoganda about "job generators" the reason investors pulled out of the ABWRs at the South Texas site? Is TEPCO to blame for Areva suspending NRC approval of the US-EPR after 8 years? Seriously I just give you like a 10 paragraph post detailing various ways that cost, economics, and the outright difficulty of designing and constructing a nuclear plant are the central factors preventing expansion of nuclear capacity. You don't acknowledge any of that, and just reflexively give the same knee-jerk horseshit preconceived non-idea that I am trying to address in the first place. The problem is thinking like this hurts any kind of pro-nuclear agenda more than Greenpeace ever does, because it keeps people who may be passionate about nuclear power blinded from actual issues they may someday do something about, able to instead just blame everything on lol stupid environmentalists and waste time in pissing contests with the teenager outside REI who just wanted their signature and 10bux.
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Apr 30, 2015 00:57
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CommieGIR posted:That's the big thing: Most solar panels are in the lower quality category, even industrial level solar panels are not even in the top 10% of solar panel output. The biggest limiting factor to solar photoelectrics is their efficiency and lack of energy storage for long term usage. The highest efficiency research cells in that chart are cells measured under solar concentration, meaning that lenses or mirrors are used to focus sunlight from a larger area onto a smaller area of solar cell. Diffuse sunlight in the atmosphere doesn't get collected by the lenses and mirrors and focused onto the surface of the cell. Non-concentrator solar cells can actually collect this sunlight--well engineered cells have no problem collecting sunlight at oblique angles. When they do the solar cell efficiency tests, they only measure the cells using a lamp which simulates direct sunlight. This effect is so important that actually the real-world per-area electricity output of concentrator solar cells with higher efficiencies in most areas of the world is actually about the same as that of the "less efficient" unconcentrated flat plate solar cells. Concentrator solar cells are less attractive for rooftop PV since they require cooling systems and mechanical tracking systems to be able to take advantage of the concentration. This is not to mention that the concentrated sunlight can be a safety hazard--think of how you can use a magnifying glass to fry ants! A lot of the nice things about solar photovoltaics is that they are simple (no plumbing and no moving parts!) and can be installed anywhere, and concentrated solar takes away a lot of those nice things about PV solar. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 01:45 on Apr 30, 2015 |
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Apr 30, 2015 00:58
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silence_kit posted:A lot of the commercial silicon monocrystalline solar cells are very efficient for flat plate photovoltaic cells. The highest efficiency research cells in that chart are cells measured under solar concentration, meaning that lenses or mirrors are used to focus sunlight from a larger area onto a smaller area of solar cell. Still not going to make them more efficient, and still doesn't solve their ~6 hour window of full usefulness. Morbus posted:Is Greenpeace the reason why the EPR is 15 years behind schedule? Do the experts at the NRC just need to take basic nuclear physics so that they can approve a design in less than 7-10 years? Is the Coal and Oil propoganda about "job generators" the reason investors pulled out of the ABWRs at the South Texas site? Is TEPCO to blame for Areva suspending NRC approval of the US-EPR after 8 years? Who do you think put most of that red-tape in please? Seriously now. Lobbyists from Greenpeace and the Sierra Club not to mention the Coal industry and others who don't want to see new reactors be built. The DoE has tried to streamline the process multiple times, including negotiating to try to get waste storage sites open, which was one of the main things outside of licensing new designs stopping them from issuing licenses, its been blocked at every turn. Are they the only reasons? No. Are the a significant roadblock. Yes.
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Apr 30, 2015 01:04
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Baronjutter posted:Aren't part of the extremely high costs for nuclear power from politically motivated regulations for the design, construction, and operation of plants that had the intent of adding so much expensive red tape it would make nuclear power too expensive to build? It's all very expensive. QA usually isn't what first jumps to peoples' minds as an expense, but it's a HUGE deal for the nuclear world. You can't just trust that any random company on ali baba is giving you good steel. You have to set up a QA system to verify everything, from fabrication to shipping to delivering to assembly to final clearance. It's a cost multiplier for materials right there. Another expense is the reactor pressure vessel. The US hasn't had the capability to build its own large RPVs for a couple decades now. We have to order them from Japan, and last I heard (~2010?) there was a wait time and large expense in ordering and shipping. I think some of it is excessive. I've had to work my rear end off to figure out how to protect a giant water tank along the North Carolina coast from a tornado larger than the ones that hit Moore. For reference, there's never been a tornado larger than an EF-2 within 150 miles of that site ever, and no EF-5s within about 800 miles. The protection being added was to protect against tornado wind-driven missiles, some of which didn't actually exist on site, and others that studies have shown would be impossible to accelerate to the speed and profiles we had to anticipate. It was absolutely over-engineering, it cost several million dollars, but it's there and making things pretty goddamn safe. SMRs (small modular reactors) are really where I hope nuclear power goes in the US. If they can adjust rules to reduce manpower required PER reactor, given the reduced size and complexity of the reactors, these can really solve a lot of problems. Scaleable, modular, simple, can be entirely factory-constructed and shipped on rail to the final destination (most of the cost overruns of constructions are related to difficulty with on-site fabrication and construction), and much lower capital requirements to avoid the $5B+ sticker shock and killer cost overruns. They're smaller output (45MWe to ~300MWe) allows them to fit into non-metropolitan locations that are currently impractical with larger units.
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Apr 30, 2015 01:06
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silence_kit posted:If crystalline silicon panels are expensive and difficult to produce, then why are they the dominant technology? 90% of all solar panels are silicon. CIGS (Cadmium, Indium, Gallium, Selenide) was a technology hyped up and supposed to compete with silicon, but never really panned out. Solyndra was a CIGS solar cell company. I would imagine because thin film panels are still quite new, and crystalline silicon panels have been around much longer, and have a much more established production chain associated with them. Thin film panels are apparently a rapidly growing market but still a comparatively very small part of the overall PV market, due to the established silicon based technologies being more prevalent. silence_kit posted:The manufacturing cost of a silicon solar cell isn't even the biggest cost of solar energy, so looking into ways to make less efficient solar cells which have lower manufacturing costs doesn't make much sense to me. A lot of the thin film solar cells like CIGS, CdTe, and organic cells almost necessarily have to be lower efficiency cells. It is almost always the case in semiconductor electronics that there is a tradeoff between material quality and ease of growth or deposition (material synthesis). I believe the idea is that they are less space efficient, but are sufficiently cheaper to manufacture that for a large scale installation, such as a PV power plant, they work out overall as cheaper. But they would not be suitable for getting say, a substantial return from sticking them on your roof. Though a PV based solar energy plant is odd given that I was under the impression that solar thermal is far easier? OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 01:10 on Apr 30, 2015 |
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Apr 30, 2015 01:06
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Phayray posted:The rest of your post is pretty good but the reality is actually a rosier picture, see (page 11): http://scientech.cwfc.com/company/spokes/pdf/cnpp_2013.pdf Well...that's technically true but by 2035 about half or so seem to be expiring so it's not that far off  More importantly though, if history is any guide, some significant fraction of these will end up shutting down without applying for a license extension, or possibly even before their license expires. In my native California, for example we just recently had two reactors shut down due to a severe maintenance fuckup that was deemed to expensive to fix (the plant was already having problems being profitable). Regardless, the point I was trying to make is simply that most of our existing nuclear capacity older rather than newer. So not only is an unprecedented expansion of nuclear capacity necessary to make a dent in greenhouse emissions, but it must take place precisely at the same time that our existing fleet of reactors is approaching end of life.
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Apr 30, 2015 01:10
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CommieGIR posted:Still not going to make them more efficient, and still doesn't solve their ~6 hour window of full usefulness. I never said that. You didn't really get the gist of my post. I was roughly explaining why the highest efficiency cells aren't a result of using higher-quality solar materials. Mono-crystalline silicon solar cells are popular solar cells made with excellent optical material. Electronics-grade mono-crystalline silicon might be the most chemically and structurally pure material in the universe. Basically, my post says that the highest efficiency research efficiency solar cells that you pointed out, mostly are higher efficiencies because they use a different scheme and not necessarily because didn't compromise on the material. Also, the efficiency advantage of concentrator solar cells is mostly negated in real-world use because of diffuse light in the atmosphere. The solar industry is growing in spite of commercial cells not being as efficient in lab tests as those research cells. Yes, solar energy is only generated during the day, but this coincides with peak electrical use in a lot of areas due to air-conditioning. You are right that without storage technology, there is a fixed % of electricity that can be generated by solar--I never disputed that. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 01:50 on Apr 30, 2015 |
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Apr 30, 2015 01:11
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GulMadred posted:Experts will already know this stuff, but casual readers can learn more by reading about lignite. It's a low-density form of coal which is essentially non-existent in international trade. Why? Because after you've paid to move it more than a few hundred kilometres, you've exhausted any possible profit that you might earn by burning it. Biomass is a global commodity. Drax Power Station, in Yorkshire, England is a 3960 MW power station. It was originally built to burn coal, and is located close to the Yorkshire coalfields. As a result of tightening emissions standards, it's converted two of its units to burn biomass. In 2013 and 2014, they sourced the overwhelming majority of their biomass from the US and Canada (page 4), and shipped it 3800 miles via freighter and train to the station. Conversion of old coal stations to burn biomass is relatively easy - build biomass stores on site (you can't just shove it in a great big heap like you can with coal), replace/upgrade your coal mills to mill biomass, and there's not much work you need to do on the boiler or turbines to carry on generating once you've got the fireball in the boiler going.
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Apr 30, 2015 01:12
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silence_kit posted:The solar industry is growing in spite of commercial cells not being as efficient in lab tests as those research cells. Yes, solar energy is only generated during the day, but this coincides with peak electrical use due to air-conditioning. You are right that without storage technology, there is a fixed % of electricity that can be generated by solar--I never disputed that. One might argue that putting solar panels on your roof to power your air conditioner is a problem that may be better solved with better building design?
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Apr 30, 2015 01:13
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OwlFancier posted:One might argue that putting solar panels on your roof to power your air conditioner is a problem that may be better solved with better building design? So tear down every air-conditioned building and rebuild them so that they stay cool in 95 degree weather... somehow?
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Apr 30, 2015 01:20
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CommieGIR posted:Who do you think put most of that red-tape in please? Seriously now. Lobbyists from Greenpeace and the Sierra Club not to mention the Coal industry and others who don't want to see new reactors be built. The DoE has tried to streamline the process multiple times, including negotiating to try to get waste storage sites open, which was one of the main things outside of licensing new designs stopping them from issuing licenses, its been blocked at every turn. If you think that reactors take a long time to certify because of Greenpeace, or that the complicated approval process amounts to "red tape", you are simply misguided. Nuclear reactors are complicated machines that need to be subject to strict and rigorous regulation and design review. There is simply no way the approval process for a nuclear reactor could last less than a few years. Most of the approval process involves providing proof, essentially, that various systems, subsystems and components meet specific engineering guidelines. Greenpeace does not come up with these things, nor does the Sierra Club, nor could they. Nuclear engineers do. If you want to do a comprehensive safety and design review of a nuclear reactor, its going to take years, not months. The industry is not over-regulated, it's just something that takes a lot of time and effort to regulate properly. Edit: note that the timeframes from design submission to approval to construction start to fully operational are similar across several different countries, some with no oil and gas industry to speak of, and some which could give a poo poo what environmentalists think. Is that a coincidence?
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Apr 30, 2015 01:28
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Well not tearing them down but when you build new ones possibly try building them in less hot areas, or with better natural ventilation? How do people manage in places that don't have aircon but where it does get very hot? I know we don't get much sun over here but aircon is kind of a weird idea to me. When it does get hot here you open the window. I mean there are well understood zero-energy architectural solutions to keeping interiors cool that have been used historically by desert civilisations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windcatcher which could conceivably be incorporated in similarly arid and hot areas of America? At least for some applications of AC anyway. Obviously it's not going to work on a skyscraper. But the standard western european house design is possibly not ideally suited for many parts of the American continent. Houses are built the way they are because of culturally ingrained aesthetics, rather than necessarily actual utility for the varied American climate. So it's weird to build a house with a design derived from a rainy, temperate, european climate in the middle of a desert, then stick a big AC unit on it to stop people from melting. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 01:38 on Apr 30, 2015 |
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Apr 30, 2015 01:29
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OwlFancier posted:I would imagine because thin film panels are still quite new, and crystalline silicon panels have been around much longer, and have a much more established production chain associated with them. Thin film panels are apparently a rapidly growing market but still a comparatively very small part of the overall PV market, due to the established silicon based technologies being more prevalent. As far as I know, the only the only big solar cell company which makes thin film solar cells is First Solar, which makes cadmium telluride (CdTe) cells. I don't think that they are doing that well right now. As far as newer, smaller companies, it doesn't make sense to be a new business where your competitive advantage is lower manufacturing cost in a field where the manufacturing cost isn't the biggest cost in generating electricity. At least it doesn't make sense to me. I don't think that the CdTe and CIGS technologies are doing that well, I'd be shocked if it were a rapidly growing market. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 01:51 on Apr 30, 2015 |
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Apr 30, 2015 01:29
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Morbus posted:If you think that reactors take a long time to certify because of Greenpeace, or that the complicated approval process amounts to "red tape", you are simply misguided. right but once we approve the design, we can build more than one of that design
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Apr 30, 2015 01:44
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OwlFancier posted:How do people manage in places that don't have aircon but where it does get very hot? Poorly.
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Apr 30, 2015 01:49
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OwlFancier posted:Well not tearing them down but when you build new ones possibly try building them in less hot areas, or with better natural ventilation? How do people manage in places that don't have aircon but where it does get very hot? Yeah, if you "open a window when it gets hot" you don't actually live somewhere that gets hot.
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Apr 30, 2015 01:52
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OwlFancier posted:Well not tearing them down but when you build new ones possibly try building them in less hot areas, or with better natural ventilation? How do people manage in places that don't have aircon but where it does get very hot? No amount of fancy building is going to remove the need for climate control in large buildings, nor will it do much for hot humid areas that happen to be major metropolitan areas. It's not dry arid places that are the problem for a lot of the US, it's hot and wet port cities. Also it'd take a poo poo ton of energy, most of it from burning fossil fuels, to rebuild all the houses in the southern US. On the other hand, a programmable thermostat removes most of the cooling needs during the middle of the day anyways when it comes to homes. I'm not really sure you'll ever see an office building that doesn't need large amounts of climate control.
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Apr 30, 2015 01:54
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I once worked in a large office building that did low energy climate control through an evaporative cooling system. Of course, it was only effective up to about 80 degrees outside.
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Apr 30, 2015 01:57
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Why do you people live in America again? It sounds horrible.
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Apr 30, 2015 01:57
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OwlFancier posted:Well not tearing them down but when you build new ones possibly try building them in less hot areas, or with better natural ventilation? How do people manage in places that don't have aircon but where it does get very hot? You open the window. It's 106 degrees outside, with 100% humidity. You start melting.
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Apr 30, 2015 02:00
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Kalman posted:I once worked in a large office building that did low energy climate control through an evaporative cooling system. Yeah. You can absolutely build a more efficient office building, but you're not going to ever get rid of the need for climate control. Humans and their machines generate too much heat. When you reach a certain point it doesn't matter how cold it is outside, you'll be running the AC full blast. (Like at a stadium, or the Mall of America.)
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Apr 30, 2015 02:01
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Morbus posted:Well...that's technically true but by 2035 about half or so seem to be expiring so it's not that far off The problem causing SONGS to shut down is definitely more of an exception rather than a trend, if for no other reason than it's a very, very expensive mistake and companies will spend money to avoid that type of issue, especially after that incident. The profitability issue (in California in particular, but in other places as well) is largely caused by incredibly cheap natural gas, the prices for which are historically not very stable, so I'm not convinced this is a 20 or 30 year long issue. Our nuclear reactors are definitely getting older and it's something to consider and I agree we need a massive expansion of nuclear capacity, both in replacing our current fleet and building new ones. However, I wouldn't be so sure that we should expect most or even more than a few reactors to go offline in the next few decades, as from what I've seen from presentations by NRC and industry representatives over the last year, pretty much everyone is going to try to get their licenses extended and keep operating if possible, and in most cases they should be able to due to how persistently and extensively nuclear reactor systems are checked and maintained. I think if we maintain our current trajectory, ie. assuming no major swing in the desire to build more reactors, we'll about break even with new plants going up and reactors going offline, in addition to increased capacity from uprating, increased capacity factors, etc.
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Apr 30, 2015 02:03
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Kalman posted:I once worked in a large office building that did low energy climate control through an evaporative cooling system. Office buildings in Manhattan on the steam grid have access to super effective evaporative cooling with the steam. It's pretty neat. OwlFancier posted:Why do you people live in America again? It sounds horrible. Well we manage to not have nearly all of our cities massively exceed pollution regulations, unlike yours.
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Apr 30, 2015 02:03
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Nintendo Kid posted:Well we manage to not have nearly all of our cities massively exceed pollution regulations, unlike yours. You won't find me arguing that UK cities aren't simply sections of hell that have somehow surfaced without anybody noticing.
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Apr 30, 2015 02:15
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Phayray posted:The problem causing SONGS to shut down is definitely more of an exception rather than a trend, if for no other reason than it's a very, very expensive mistake and companies will spend money to avoid that type of issue, especially after that incident. The profitability issue (in California in particular, but in other places as well) is largely caused by incredibly cheap natural gas, the prices for which are historically not very stable, so I'm not convinced this is a 20 or 30 year long issue. You're probably right. I'm a little pessimistic about hoping that price increases in fossil fuels will help mitigate the profitability problem some nuclear plants have been having. Low natural gas prices are a direct consequence of the boom in unconventional recovery, and it could be that inexpensive fossil fuels will be around for at least as long as we need to completely gently caress ourselves. I think "about breaking even" is a realistic assessment if nothing big changes. Since truly massive increases in nuclear capacity needed to make a significant dent in greenhouse gas emissions, I'm not optimistic about seeing that happen in the next couple decades. Palace of Hate posted:right but once we approve the design, we can build more than one of that design That is more or less how it already works, except site-specific certifications still have to be made, especially, for example, if it turns out that you built your plant near But if you look at the examples I gave, even once a single reactor design is finally approved, you end up with additional delays from 1.) approving it in other countries, 2.) construction delays/cost overruns, and 3.) investors abandoning the project. There really isn't a single problem nor is there a single solution. Everything just stems from the fact that nuclear power is a lot more expensive and complicated than just about anything else. So if you really want to expand capacity rapidly, you need a unified front politically, industrially, and economically that simply doesn't exist right now. That has less to do with Greenpeace and more to do with a lack of urgency/consensus/will on the part of the leadership in most/all countries.
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Apr 30, 2015 02:54
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Since this thread seems to be active again, what do you guys think of this report? It says that within the next 30 years it will become cheaper for consumers to have grid-tie rooftop solar PV with battery storage systems than for them to remain purely on the grid virtually everwhere in the US. The report also says that consumers with such systems would only have to draw 10-30% of their electricity from the grid on an annual basis. Is this a realistic scenario? The report seems to match up with what is happening in Hawaii right now so I'm inclined to believe it is, but I'd like to hear this thread's opinion especially since there are lots of people here who are highly skeptical of any 50+% renewable scenario.
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Apr 30, 2015 03:52
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To be fair, they burn Oil for Electricity in Hawaii, so its weird out there.
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Apr 30, 2015 07:46
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Trabisnikof posted:To be fair, they burn Oil for Electricity in Hawaii, so its weird out there. Hawaii also offers a nice big tax credit to anyone who throws solar on their roof. The tax credit, sunny climate, and very high electricity prices all make solar an extremely appealing option
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Apr 30, 2015 07:53
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quote:I think that you are wrong. Show your work. I actually did that exact thing, but then I deleted most of it because you insisted that you were not pushing for a 100% renewable scenario. Are you pushing for a 100% renewable scenario now? Back of the envelope using numbers adopted here you get about 2 MWe/km^2 from a modern wind turbine. We'll need about 10 TWe of generating capacity by 2050. That's 5 million square kilometers. However, these numbers assume a lot of ideal conditions. Building wind to this scale would reduce the average capacity factor significantly, that decreases the average amount of power that you get per square kilometer. We've also only spec'd the number of turbines that we'd need on average, so we'll need a lot more turbines in order to handle peak demand. Speaking of demand, sometimes turbines fail or need to be brought down for maintenance, so we'll also need a lot more additional turbines for redundancy. There's also the small issue where Earth isn't a big flat rectangle; sometimes you need to put turbines in suboptimal locations with respect to each other, so that 2 MWe/km^2 falls a bit more once you start building on such a large scale. Together, these and other unconsidered issues probably work out to about an order of magnitude, so call it 50 million square kilometers. This is a conservative estimate. Coincidentally, Earth only has about 150 square kilometers of actual land. 50 square kilometers is a third of that. How did you come to 1%? Even if you intentionally ignore a lot of important factors that wind up ballooning the mandatory land area, you're still talking about at least 5 million square kilometers out of 150 million. That's much more than 1%. quote:Not true. Multiple people in the thread have made that assertion: blowfish and Palace of Hate both have. I think that you are wrong. I think that you've misinterpreted a vaguely related assertion
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Apr 30, 2015 08:11
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QuarkJets posted:Coincidentally, Earth only has about 150 square kilometers of actual land.  quote:How did you come to 1%? pre:22 126 TWh/year (global electricity generation for 2011) = 79 653 600 000 000 000 000 J/year 2 W/m2 (your own stat for wind turbines; assumes 6m/s average windspeed) = 63 113 852 J/year/m2 79 653 600 000 000 000 000 J/year ÷ 63 113 852 J/year/m2 = 1 262 062 090 585 m2 = 1 262 062 km2 1 262 062 km2 (calculated wind generation footprint) ÷ 148 940 000 km2 (Earth land area) = 0.00847
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Apr 30, 2015 09:01
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Nintendo Kid posted:Office buildings in Manhattan on the steam grid have access to super effective evaporative cooling with the steam. It's pretty neat. Out of interest are there actually a set of EU style regulations that US cities have to abide by, and get sued for breaking? Given the right wing market utopia you live in I'm gonna go ahead and guess not, but maybe I'm wrong. I can imagine NIMBY Americans care more about keeping their backyard air clean than they do about making GBS threads on the world's climate generally.
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Apr 30, 2015 09:10
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Morbus posted:I think "about breaking even" is a realistic assessment if nothing big changes. Since truly massive increases in nuclear capacity needed to make a significant dent in greenhouse gas emissions, I'm not optimistic about seeing that happen in the next couple decades. China and India. China especially seems to just throw everything at the wall to see what sticks, which sounds like a decent approach when they're still looking at massive future expansion of their electricity generation and are slowly becoming aware of the fact that putting cheap coal plants loving everywhere is a bad idea. In a decade or two, they should have enough experience to ditch the least useful electricity sources and we'll find out whether two thirds of Europe and the US missed the nuclear opportunity, if renewables will sort of work out anyway, or if we're just totally hosed.
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Apr 30, 2015 09:35
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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Trabisnikof posted:To be fair, they burn Oil for Electricity in Hawaii, so its weird out there. They're changing it to burning natural gas once the liquid natural gas ports are up and running. lmaoboy1998 posted:Out of interest are there actually a set of EU style regulations that US cities have to abide by, and get sued for breaking? Given the right wing market utopia you live in I'm gonna go ahead and guess not, but maybe I'm wrong. I can imagine NIMBY Americans care more about keeping their backyard air clean than they do about making GBS threads on the world's climate generally. No, as there are simply national level pollution requirements that are really quite strict, and are met. It wasn't that long ago that many US cities experienced regular China-level pollution events.
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Apr 30, 2015 15:55
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Hawaii is an interesting case with the issues coming up from the back flow. The engineer in me abhors decentralized power generation, but it seems like it's going to happen no matter what. I suppose a smart grid to combat a lot of the issues is going to happen sooner or later, and that's job security.
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Apr 30, 2015 16:37
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted:Hawaii is an interesting case with the issues coming up from the back flow. The engineer in me abhors decentralized power generation, but it seems like it's going to happen no matter what. I suppose a smart grid to combat a lot of the issues is going to happen sooner or later, and that's job security. Electricity generation should be like staple crop production: employs some people, but everyone else can choose not to care about it beyond paying in order to spend more time on other things.
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Apr 30, 2015 16:46
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QuarkJets posted:How did you come to 1%? Even if you intentionally ignore a lot of important factors that wind up ballooning the mandatory land area, you're still talking about at least 5 million square kilometers out of 150 million. That's much more than 1%. I calculated 1% by using the total electrical energy generated by nuclear power plants in 2011, an estimation on the area required for nuclear power plants, 4 km^2 per plant, which includes the safety exclusion areas for the ~500 plants in the world, and the 100x number for area required for wind versus nuclear from blowfish's pro-nuclear source, for which it is likely that he did the bookkeeping to make his case look stronger. That gives me the area required for wind power to generate the same amount of electricity as nuclear power in 2011. I then multiplied that by 10 because nuclear power plants only generated 10% of the world's electricity in 2011. In any case, you are totally wrong about it being glaringly obvious that there's not enough farmland for future expansion of wind power. GulMadred posted:Less than 1%. We had to ignore capacity factor, exhaustion of favourable sites, overcapacity to meet peak demand (and/or land which would need to be set aside for energy-storage systems), transmission losses, storage losses, potential wide-scale depletion of wind energy availability, etc. And we used the numbers for 2011 instead of 2050. You realize that capacity factor and exhaustion of good sites for wind is largely already accounted for when you use electrical energy generated from an average wind speed in your calculation, right? You can quibble about what that average speed should be, of course. Maybe in that guy's pro-nuclear website's estimate, it is too high. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 18:41 on Apr 30, 2015 |
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Apr 30, 2015 18:32
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