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blowfish posted:Water isn't as easily available but unless you live in a desert you'll be able to divert some into a reservoir and it will not damage anything except whatever was under the physical footprint of the reservoir. Except for dolphins, earthquakes, and anyone downstream of banqiao dam, of course.
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Nov 19, 2015 00:01
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blowfish posted:It's actually a major issue even if your requirement could be satisfied by something as basic as a giant pile of tin cans. Atmospheric gases are free and turning them into an energy storage medium them doesn't damage much of anything. Water isn't as easily available but unless you live in a desert you'll be able to divert some into a reservoir and it will not damage anything except whatever was under the physical footprint of the reservoir. Having any sort of storage medium that requires inputs of resources that are not readily available means extracting loads of the relevant resource (duh) with additional environmental costs. If your storage medium ever wears out, this will keep going on forever and not just be a one-time investment. Therefore, hydro or synthetic fuel/H2 are the preferred option for any large scale storage that doesn't need to be portable, though the latter are obviously also serviceable for portable applications. Except for the cases where the environmental/economic/energy benefit of the storage outweighs the costs of mining the resources required to make the storage capacity. Likewise, you have to include the other externalized costs of things like pumped hydro or compressed air. New hydro often means land use change that can have significant impacts for example. I don't think the answer is clear as to which energy storage technologies are the best yet. If UBS/PwC/etc are correct about batteries, we may move to a point where they do make economic and environmental sense. It is that old "Chinese" curse...to live in interesting times....
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Nov 19, 2015 00:03
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Tunicate posted:Except for dolphins, earthquakes, and anyone downstream of banqiao dam, of course. Current climate models say they're hosed anyways so...
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Nov 19, 2015 00:06
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Deteriorata posted:The fundamental problem with reprocessing was transporting the waste. Period. It needs to be revisited, and Greenpeace told right to gently caress off. Those guys are more trouble than they are worth.
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Nov 19, 2015 00:28
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CommieGIR posted:It needs to be revisited, and Greenpeace told right to gently caress off. Those guys are more trouble than they are worth. They vandalized a world heritage site. They can get right hosed.
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Nov 19, 2015 00:29
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Tunicate posted:They vandalized a world heritage site. They can get right hosed. I completely forgot about that. loving morons.
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Nov 19, 2015 00:34
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All Greenpeace does now is destroy things they don't like. As in, literally destroy them. It's childish and pathetic. gently caress Greenpeace.
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Nov 19, 2015 01:33
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Major parts of the environmental movement seem to have fallen into the same trap as the GOP, where lack of new blood is forcing them to continually use strategies and ideologies from 40 years ago. In both cases, they're due for a shakeup soon. Although I guess for the environmental people, it's more that large parts of their platform was accepted by society, so they can't really do that much while remaining distinct except act crazy.
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Nov 19, 2015 02:06
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hobbesmaster posted:Current climate models say they're hosed anyways so... Unfortunately there can also be serious carbon impacts due to the expansion of hydropower, largely because much of the potential for expansion lies in tropical zones. This often means hydro reservoirs replacing huge tracts of rainforest, and often high methane emissions. The extra methane is largely due to warmer water, and it can be substantial.
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Nov 19, 2015 02:57
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Total Meatlove posted:The UK's first engineered geothermal system is struggling for £12m of EU funding because the government refused to put in £37m. The UK has had a geothermal system since the 1980s. In other UK power news, UK's coal plants to be phased out within 10 years * * Except those with CCS.
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Nov 19, 2015 02:59
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Taffer posted:All Greenpeace does now is destroy things they don't like. As in, literally destroy them. It's childish and pathetic. We have a stupid environmentalist problem and a need to get rid of our left over chemical weapons problem. Why can't we put this together?
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Nov 19, 2015 03:07
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Placid Marmot posted:The UK has had a geothermal system since the 1980s. Except they're switching to gas instead.
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Nov 19, 2015 03:25
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Beffer posted:Except they're switching to gas instead. Gas is far far better for the environment and the climate than coal. So an improvement if not the end goal.
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Nov 19, 2015 03:28
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Trabisnikof posted:I'm not sure if I would call Carter under-informed or "silly" in his opinions of nuclear power. So fun trivia fact - Ina Garten (yeah, that Ina Garten) was at the OMB during the Ford and Carter administrations as a budget analyst writing various policy papers on nuclear energy.
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Nov 19, 2015 05:48
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Deteriorata posted:The fundamental problem with reprocessing was transporting the waste. Period. Eh...no. Reprocessing waste requires the large scale civilian deployment of what is essentially nuclear weapon infrastructure. This poses enough difficulties for domestic implementation, and can be something of a show-stopper if you want to develop technology for export. Throw in the fact that there is, at present anyway, a huge global surplus of weapons grade U235 that can be (and is being) downblended into fuel for civilian reactors, plus comparatively low uranium prices for the last several decades, and it is no surprise whatsoever that light water reactors using once-through LEU cycles have become the principal technology used for commercial nuclear power production worldwide.
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Nov 19, 2015 06:49
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My understanding is that a lot of the anti-nuclear environmentalists were less motivated by environmentalism and more by a desire for nuclear disarmament. Which politically keys in to banning reprocessing - committing to once-through means cutting out the argument (however unsound) that civilian nuclear power just feeds the nuclear weapons program.Sinestro posted:We have a stupid environmentalist problem and a need to get rid of our left over chemical weapons problem. Why can't we put this together? We've already made great progress on incinerating the chemical weapons stockpile. The Umatilla depot in Oregon is now empty, for example. Although that reminds me that I still think the old chemical weapons depots should be looked at as possible storage locations for nuclear waste. I mean, a cask full of spent fuel is probably less hazardous than containers of nerve gas.
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Nov 19, 2015 07:06
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Tunicate posted:He was a sub officer on a diesel sub, but he wasn't a nuclear engineer - his dad died while Carter was taking the nuclear power courses, so he resigned his commission midway through them to run the family business. He didn't say that Carter was a nuclear engineer, he said that Carter knew more about nuclear power than any other president. The fact that Carter took any nuclear physics/engineering courses at all, even for a little while, puts him leagues ahead of any other US president that has ever served when it comes to this topic.
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Nov 19, 2015 07:15
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I don't think most of the environmentalist opposition to nuclear power was/is sophisticated or nuanced enough to really care about whether or not fuel was reprocessed and/or the ramifications this has on proliferation. Ultimately, a once-through fuel cycle is just more economical as long as A.) you are using thermal instead of breeder reactors and B.) Uranium is relatively cheap and you have a large supply of U235. You will find almost no credible analysis that points to reprocessing being more economical than once-through in thermal reactors at present or the foreseeable future. There are still reasons to do it, like self sufficiency, reduction of high level waste, as part of a weapons program or just to maintain a latent weapons capability. But its not going to make it easier to have more nuclear power at a lower cost, at least not right now or in the near future.
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Nov 19, 2015 07:25
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:Solar panels wear out eventually, right? What's the process for recycling them? Polycrystalline silicon solar panels suffer degradation of roughly 0.6% efficiency loss annually. They tend to be warrantied for 25 years with a lifespan of about 35 years, where lifespan is defined as 99% of panels are still operating at above 70% original efficiency. Monocrystalline silicon solar pannels suffer degradation of roughly 0.4% efficiency loss annually. They tend to be warrantied for 25 years with a lifespan of about 42 years, where lifespan is defined as 99% of panels are still operating at above 70% original efficiency. This is why there's limited recycling, how many people installed solar panels in 1980? The ones Jimmy Carter installed on the White House roof would just now be at a point where they would need to be recycled. There's not really a recycling market because there's not really enough needing to be recycled yet. The majority of panels getting tossed right now are defective. The big recycling market is going to happen in 10 to 15 years when the solar panels installed at the beginning of the big push for solar 10 years ago start wearing down. Even just thrown away at the end of the 25 years though, solar electric has something like 10% the ecological impact of natural gas. All these articles about how surprisingly damaging solar panel manufacturing can be for the environment fail to mention that they are still extremely good compared to alternatives. Solar is starting to reach a point however where there needs to be either investment/incentives in decentralized storage, centralized storage, and grid upgrades. Future growth of solar will eventually require a storage infrastructure to smooth out the effect of sunset and suddenly having a huge demand. In California, solar is currently at a point where the solar generation is a bit less than the increased usage during daytime from people working, using AC, etc., and that's why next year there will be changes coming from utility companies to slow future growth. Utility companies do not want to have to store power they don't generate.
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Nov 19, 2015 07:27
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Placid Marmot posted:The UK has had a geothermal system since the 1980s. The Southampton plant sits atop a natural aquifer (at quite a low temperature iirc, something like 65C) so isn't an engineered system, which involves fracking to create an artificial reservoir. The fact that there is only one commercial geothermal plant in the UK given the potential is shocking, and even that's used more as a district heating scheme than it is for generation.
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Nov 19, 2015 08:54
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Morbus posted:Eh...no. Reprocessing waste requires the large scale civilian deployment of what is essentially nuclear weapon infrastructure. This poses enough difficulties for domestic implementation, and can be something of a show-stopper if you want to develop technology for export. There's no reason that the actual reprocessing needs to be done by the civilian sector, it could be done on well guarded military bases and probably run at a profit for the government. Further it could be a thing exported to countries we already trust with nuclear weapons so that they can do the reprocessing themselves, or else set up a market where trusted countries import waste and export it back as usable fuel.
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Nov 19, 2015 15:39
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Or just continue the current once through fuel cycle but store waste accessibly for breeders.
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Nov 19, 2015 15:55
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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fermun posted:Polycrystalline silicon solar panels suffer degradation of roughly 0.6% efficiency loss annually. They tend to be warrantied for 25 years with a lifespan of about 35 years, where lifespan is defined as 99% of panels are still operating at above 70% original efficiency. 25 years doesn't sound like very long for power generation. And it's really not even 25 years if they are significantly degraded by that time. Nuclear plants from the 60s are still humming along (presumably at or near their original capacity), and there are operational coal plants 20 years older than that which will likely only be retired for regulatory reasons. Having to effectively rebuild your entire generating capacity every generation seems like an awful waste of resources.
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Nov 19, 2015 16:48
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:25 years doesn't sound like very long for power generation. And it's really not even 25 years if they are significantly degraded by that time. Nuclear plants from the 60s are still humming along (presumably at or near their original capacity), and there are operational coal plants 20 years older than that which will likely only be retired for regulatory reasons. Having to effectively rebuild your entire generating capacity every generation seems like an awful waste of resources.
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Nov 19, 2015 16:51
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fermun posted:This is why there's limited recycling, how many people installed solar panels in 1980? The ones Jimmy Carter installed on the White House roof would just now be at a point where they would need to be recycled. There's not really a recycling market because there's not really enough needing to be recycled yet. The majority of panels getting tossed right now are defective. The big recycling market is going to happen in 10 to 15 years when the solar panels installed at the beginning of the big push for solar 10 years ago start wearing down. Honestly, silicon solar cell recycling doesn't make much sense to me. The raw material input to solar-grade silicon, sand, is incredibly cheap. The relatively expensive thing about silicon is the purification and crystal growth, which probably would need to be re-done for the recycled panels. Given those facts I doubt that it is economical to recycle, but I don't know the numbers. Maybe it makes sense economically. The link for the recycling program that Trabisnikof linked was from First Solar, a cadmium telluride solar cell company, where the economics is a little different and where recycling might make economic sense. fermun posted:Even just thrown away at the end of the 25 years though, solar electric has something like 10% the ecological impact of natural gas. All these articles about how surprisingly damaging solar panel manufacturing can be for the environment fail to mention that they are still extremely good compared to alternatives. People in this thread love to point out how solar cell manufacturing uses chemicals or that solar cells don't grow on trees or that solar cells don't last forever and thus eventually need to be thrown away, but they never actually make a meaningful comparison between pollution/waste generated from solar PV and other energy generation technologies. fermun posted:Solar is starting to reach a point however where there needs to be either investment/incentives in decentralized storage, centralized storage, and grid upgrades. Future growth of solar will eventually require a storage infrastructure to smooth out the effect of sunset and suddenly having a huge demand. In California, solar is currently at a point where the solar generation is a bit less than the increased usage during daytime from people working, using AC, etc., and that's why next year there will be changes coming from utility companies to slow future growth. Utility companies do not want to have to store power they don't generate. Would you be willing to make a prediction about the future cost of solar electricity? Unfortunately for solar cells, their theoretical performance limits were recognized very early on, in the 1950's, and it is unlikely that they can improve much in that area. You are an idiot if you think that there is some kind of Moore's Law for solar cells since they are both semi-conductor devices. However it is less clear about how much the cost can improve. I mean what I'm about to say is just hypothetical/conjecture/fantasy, but if someday we were to live in a world where solar electricity was incredibly cheap, the entire calculus of how we generate electricity would probably be compelled to change. We could get away with relatively wasteful energy storage technology like electro-chemically synthesized fuels, and industry would be more motivated to change what they do to use the incredibly cheap excess electricity during the day. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 17:13 on Nov 19, 2015 |
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Nov 19, 2015 16:55
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Saint Fu posted:Are those 50 year old nuclear plants still using all of their original equipment? Just because the physical exterior building is still original, doesn't mean a bunch of the equipment inside the walls haven't been replaced over the years as they wear out. The core parts are likely original. They specifically use demineralized/deionized water to significantly reduce corrosion and the only major wear items outside of the fuel is the turbines, but those can last for decades with proper care.
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Nov 19, 2015 17:16
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CommieGIR posted:The core parts are likely original. They specifically use demineralized/deionized water to significantly reduce corrosion and the only major wear items outside of the fuel is the turbines, but those can last for decades with proper care. Steam generators are another huge complicated part that needs replacing on nuclear plants that are replaced at least once in the service life. I think if we want to compare O/M and replacement costs among generating technologies, that makes sense to me, but out of context the lifespan of a component isn't that really useful when trying to understand the overall costs.
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Nov 19, 2015 17:29
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Some components basically ARE the plant for the Gen 2 reactors. If the reactor pressure vessel gets a bad crack, the plant is dead, like at crystal river. Cracks in the steam generation tubes killed San Onofre. They're designed to last, because they're tens to hundreds of millions of dollars each. You'd be surprised, and slightly alarmed, to learn how much of a nuke plant is original parts in some capacity. A benefit and curse of the analog instrument era.
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Nov 19, 2015 17:29
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Pander posted:Some components basically ARE the plant for the Gen 2 reactors. If the reactor pressure vessel gets a bad crack, the plant is dead, like at crystal river. Cracks in the steam generation tubes killed San Onofre. They're designed to last, because they're tens to hundreds of millions of dollars each. Both the plants you listed were replacing major components when they were damaged. The cracked steam generator at San Onofre was the replacement one. Crystal river the cracked the containment vessel while replacing the steam generators.
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Nov 19, 2015 17:34
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Trabisnikof posted:Both the plants you listed were replacing major components when they were damaged. The cracked steam generator at San Onofre was the replacement one. Crystal river the cracked the containment vessel while replacing the steam generators. Um, yeah, I think I'm in agreement with you? I was going off memory so forgot the particulars, but the gist was everything nuclear quality is expensive, repair/replacements do happen, and if you suffer an unexpected catastrophic failure on a major structure or component, the plant's existence is threatened.
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Nov 19, 2015 17:42
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Reprocessing is one of those things that makes absolute sense from an engineering standpoint, and none politically. The waste from once through is relatively small, just like the fuel use. Just store the waste for the future, maybe then it can be politically feasible. It sucks, but I'd rather not have proliferation fears leading to coal being used a minute longer then it needs to be.
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Nov 19, 2015 18:09
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Pander posted:Um, yeah, I think I'm in agreement with you? I was going off memory so forgot the particulars, but the gist was everything nuclear quality is expensive, repair/replacements do happen, and if you suffer an unexpected catastrophic failure on a major structure or component, the plant's existence is threatened. No worries, I was confused about if you meant those issues were in the original hardware or not.
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Nov 19, 2015 18:12
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted:Reprocessing is one of those things that makes absolute sense from an engineering standpoint, and none politically. From a political proliferation/security standpoint, reprocessing is a risk that the people don't really care about, but the military considers doomsday waiting to happen. From an political environmental standpoint (which is where most opposition to nuclear power comes from), reprocessing is loving aces. Massively reduce nuclear waste? Don't worry about long-term storage (or orders of magnitude less worry)? Any system that would simplify the scary ATOMS disposal process would be a political coup for getting people on board with nuclear power. These days, people don't have the Cold War nuclear doomsday fears like they used to. They most definitely have Climate Change doomsday fears, though.
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Nov 19, 2015 19:00
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Regarding lithium ion, while they're not the friendliest things to manufacture, aren't they ridiculously recyclable after they go bad? Like to the point that sans distribution/collection costs, they're actually profitable to recycle?
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Nov 19, 2015 20:05
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Boten Anna posted:Regarding lithium ion, while they're not the friendliest things to manufacture, aren't they ridiculously recyclable after they go bad? Like to the point that sans distribution/collection costs, they're actually profitable to recycle? But they generally don't get recycled.
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Nov 19, 2015 20:33
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I'm sure Tesla is going to be in house recycling all the batteries returned under warranty.
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Nov 19, 2015 21:10
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fishmech posted:There's no reason that the actual reprocessing needs to be done by the civilian sector, it could be done on well guarded military bases and probably run at a profit for the government. Further it could be a thing exported to countries we already trust with nuclear weapons so that they can do the reprocessing themselves, or else set up a market where trusted countries import waste and export it back as usable fuel. To some extent this is what happens, especially when reprocessing is already being done anyway as part of an ongoing weapons program. But if you want to reprocess on a large enough scale to have a truly closed fuel cycle, you need to employ lots of people at large facilities. It doesn't matter whether they are run by a private corporation, SOE, or directly by the military, the security requirements are the same and this makes it an expensive endeavor. The point isn't that it can't be done, France in particular has a basically entirely closed fuel cycle, and they reprocess fuel for other countries and sell them fabricated fuel. The UK, Russia, and Japan also all reprocess to some degree. Its just that its a pain in the rear end and not really cost competitive so why bother? Countries with major reprocessing efforts do not enjoy lower fuel costs than the US, and indeed studies almost unanimously point to reprocessing being more expensive than once-through when using thermal reactors, at least for now. The reasons the aforementioned nations reprocess their fuel is partially due to the things I mentioned in my previous post: self sufficiency with respect to their fuel cycle, keeping weapons-relevant infrastructure active, or to reduce the volume of high-level waste. Part of it also has to do with the fact that the lead time on this stuff is typically decades long, and if in the past you expected uranium to be more scarce and expensive now than it ended up being, investing in reprocessing made a lot of sense. If a nation has already sunk that cost, and reprocessing isn't vastly worse than once-through, it makes sense to keep doing it, for the above reasons and also for if/when the cheap uranium days end I will re-iterate my point that given the current economics of uranium, from a purely cost point of view, reprocessing is dubious, especially if you aren't already doing it. How can you justify the huge initial cost of building reprocessing facilities or ramping up existing capacity when doing so wont make things any cheaper? If uranium were scarce and expensive, things would be different of course. A lot of the problem with reprocessing boils down to uranium simply being cheaper than people expected. Low uranium prices also helped kill breeder reactors, which would have otherwise made reprocessing more competitive. Breeders also suffered from higher capital cost than conventional reactors (which are already too high), risks, costs, and regulatory hurdles associated with unfamiliarity with fast reactor operation, especially those requiring exotic coolants, and also the fact that if you spend a ton of money on a reactor design and getting it approved, its nice to be able to not worry about who you can export it to, which is never going to happen with breeders. "Hey, potential investors: its more expensive that those other plants that are years behind schedule and hugely overbudget, it probably won't be any cheaper or safer until we have a few decades of experience running them, the concept doesn't even make economical sense in the current uranium market, but at least you won't be able to export them to most emerging markets!"
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Nov 19, 2015 21:32
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Wow this explanation for US policy with respect to nuclear energy makes a lot more sense to me than the narrative in this thread, which is basically that the US government was at the beck and call of fringe environmentalist groups. Thanks for your post.
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Nov 19, 2015 22:21
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silence_kit posted:Wow this explanation for US policy with respect to nuclear energy makes a lot more sense to me than the narrative in this thread, which is basically that the US government was at the beck and call of fringe environmentalist groups. Thanks for your post. No one has asserted that. The opposition to transporting nuclear waste was sufficient that reprocessing had to have a whole lot going for it to make it worth pushing the protesters aside. It didn't. The official reason was preventing nuclear proliferation. Carter didn't want reprocessing waste to be perceived as a norm, as it would too tempting for countries with commercial nuclear power to hide a bomb program in it. As Morbus pointed out, the cost of reprocessed fuel turned out to be higher than fresh fuel, as well, so there really wasn't any good reason to push on reprocessing - although the fuel cost is not really that big of a deal for nuclear reactors, so it was a relatively minor issue. What reprocessing had going for it was inertia. It was part of the original plans for civilian nuclear energy, and was going forward just because it was the plan. The anti-nuclear stuff made the government sit up and take stock whether the whole reprocessing thing was actually worth it. In the end, reprocessing had nothing going for it except for engineering elegance. There was no reason to shout down the anti-nuke crazies, so they got to think they won.
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Nov 19, 2015 23:01
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Infinite Karma posted:Reprocessing is much more complicated than that. Sorry, but I don't see any evidence that reprocessing would get any different of a reaction from the public over the current reaction various waste disposal plans get. People are afraid of atomic energy, and any moving of waste around to reprocessing facilities would run into the same stupid opposition that we see from green party types.
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Nov 20, 2015 02:24
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