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silence_kit posted:Could you show your work? In the online book Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air, the author, who by the way is not really committed to solar energy at all, does a back of the envelope calculation, and concludes that there is enough roof space in not exactly sunny Britain to make a pretty good dent in personal use. It's an old book--he mostly complained about the current production of solar being too low and the price being too high, but of course things have changed a lot in the past couple of years. I severely doubt that. Here's a map of solar exposure for Europe and for the USA:   Note the two different unit scales. 1900 (aka the red on the Europe map) is ~5.2 kWh/m2/day, which is the orange-ish area you'll see around the Southeast US. London itself looks to be around 3.0 kWh/m2/day, which is less than any solar area in the contiguous United States, even places like Seattle.
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Nov 30, 2015 00:30
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computer parts posted:I severely doubt that. Ok, so you haven't actually worked it out. You are showing plots of average solar intensity per day or year of various places in the world, and are concluding that since Britain isn't very sunny, therefore that guy who wrote the book's calculation is wrong. I think that the error in your reasoning should be pretty obvious . . . silence_kit fucked around with this message at 01:02 on Nov 30, 2015 |
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Nov 30, 2015 00:50
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silence_kit posted:You are ignoring that flat plate solar cells can be put on houses, office buildings, over covered parking lots, etc. You don't need to slash native forests to put in solar cells. They can pretty much be installed anywhere. You do if you want to meet national demand, which is what we're talking about. We've gone through the math a few times in this thread. Putting solar cells on every existing structure in the US does not get you anywhere close to where you need to be if you're going to only use renewable power sources. You don't if you're going to mix renewables with something with better land usage efficiency like nuclear power (or coal or natural gas but gently caress both of those) silence_kit posted:
A) We're talking about total national use, not personal use. The author goes out of his way to explain that putting solar panels on every roof in the UK wouldn't even come close to meeting national demand there, even when you use a bunch of forgiving assumptions like being able to put solar hot water and PV systems on top of each other (lol) B) We're talking about total conversion of the power grid to renewable sources, so any successful power generation strategy needs to meet total national demand, not some fraction of that. C) His numbers don't include a number of important things: redundancy to handle intermittancy, the space required for storage, or the losses due to transmission/transformation/storage/recovery D) Electric power consumption in the US is about 2.5x greater than in the UK. That's bulk usage, not personal, but we can probably safely assume that personal usage is at least a factor of 2 greater here (mostly attributable to air conditioning, I would guess) QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 01:10 on Nov 30, 2015 |
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Nov 30, 2015 01:07
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QuarkJets posted:Putting solar cells on every existing structure in the US does not get you anywhere close to where you need to be I think that "not anywhere close" is an exaggeration. I don't believe you. Do the calculation. I don't think that the energy density will really a huge problem for the continuing build out of the technology, but if you can show otherwise, I'd be interested. The more pressing issue is that it is only suitable for generating the fraction of electricity used during the peak hours of the day. That point has been run into the ground in this thread. I'm also not really committed to running the world on only solar cells. It's an interesting alternate energy source because it, in some places, is more attractive economically than fossil fuels to provide electricity. The solar electricity price is still dropping. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 01:29 on Nov 30, 2015 |
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Nov 30, 2015 01:26
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Effectronica posted:I actually did major in physics, as it happens, but, "Killer-of-Lawyers", the point is that "blowfish" is, from all appearances, talking out of his rear end. Ideally, he would have provided some justification for "dose limits are too low!", that inerrant macaw's squawk of the nuclear cultist. This is unlikely to ever happen, alas for him. Repeat after me: Cells can respond to radiation by increasing their defense mechanisms like DNA repair and will change gene expression instead of accumulating damage like a rock. The largest overview study of low dose radiation found extremely small increases in cancer rates for low radiation levels, and even with a sample size of 400.000 had trouble detecting any increase below 50mSv which is above even emergency work limits (anyone who has tried using statistical tests on different sample sizes knows it's downright hard to find something which isn't significant at n=400000). There is preliminary evidence that this is a thing in real human populations exposed to high background radiation, which typically don't have elevated cancer rates.
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Nov 30, 2015 02:04
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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QuarkJets posted:First, you're overestimating the destructive capacity of a nuclear meltdown by a huge margin. Amusingly hydro electric plants were often built so nuclear plants could run full tilt 24/7 because it was cheaper and more efficient than cycling them up and down. It's not that much of an issue with newer designs but a lot of hydro electric plants are a legacy of those first reactor designs.
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Nov 30, 2015 02:22
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 Photo voltaic cells are made of doped silicon. This takes a pure silicon base and deposits quantities (Depending on manufacturer and intended use) of Boron, Arsenic, Phosphorus, Gallium, Antimony, and Indium. For example Gallium and Indium are popular for thin cells. The cheapest mass produced cells often use Boron/Phosphorus combos. Many alternates like Cadmium Telluride cells are becoming more popular due to efficiency and ease of manufacture but Cadmium is toxic and Tellurium is comparable with platinum in scarcity. Over time the efficiency of cells decline. So for the rest of this post i'm going to make the following assumptions about the cells
This means that ideally 1GW of solar power generation requires $300 Million ( in cheep PV's and 2.5 square miles of real estate. This space can be on roofs or desert, that's a matter of land use value. Next storage must be considered. Currently Solar's biggest use is offsetting daytime air conditioning, so storage isn't as much of an issue as air conditioning isn't used much at night. Other power is supplied at that time. For a fully closed system you need to store your projected overnight useage plus some buffer and generate enough during daylight to both power all expected demand and fully charge up for the next night. American households average just above 900KWh per month, or 30KWh a day. Successfully generating that amount of power in 1/3 of a day is practical because as per current grid solar useage the majority of power consumption is also during that period. A Tesla power wall only holds 7.5KWh. And its a $7000, 200lb investment. Thats plenty of Lithium. Your other options are Lead Acid Batteries which have their own problems. But to the owner an ideal 4Kw system, "$4k", and 26m2 As for actual deployment the Topaz Solar Farm in southern california cost $2.5 Billion and generates 550MW with 9 million Cadmium Telluride panels on 9.5 square miles. I'll leave off on solar for a moment, I feel like i'm already meandering. Lets compare this with Indian Point reactors in NY. 2x 1GW continuous production. Each reactor has to shutdown for a month every 2 years for refueling. From what I can find refuels cost about $40 Million. Modern operations since 1974. The plant was originally constructed for $2.5 billion in 2010 adjusted price. Which is cheep. Certain 1GW reactors have ranged up to $8 Billion due to one off designs or construction delays.. As for the enviromental concerns of the building of a nuclear reactor.
Plant engineering is really beautiful. Its all based on steam engineering. We're great at making steam pipes and systems. High speed turbines, some of whom have magnetic bearings and don't even need oil lubricants. Containment is steel and concrete. Machinery is steel. Pipes are steel. Steam is made in steel containers. The thermal cycle is almost the same as it is in any other energy plant. The nuclear components have some more impact, but sadly most of that is due to NIMBY before and after use. Borrated Polyethelene is used for neutron radiation shielding. Hafnium can be used as neutron absorbers in control rods. The Uranium Oxide fuel is most often coated in a Zirconium Alloy cladding. So Uranium, Zirconium, and Hafnium are the major rare metals used. Luckily besides the initial mining the production process is so strictly controlled that almost no hazardous waste (In the metallic sense) is produced. Uranium fuel itself is very safe to be around prior to its activation is an operating reactor. Uranium primarily decays via alpha emission. An Alpha (effectively a high energy helium nucleus) is easily blocked by paper, skin, and clothing and poses no harm unless its source is inside of you. Don't eat the Uranium. Post use nuclear fuel is highly radioactive and is stored underwater in special containment's. Properly designed nuclear reactors also have a very cool physical phenomenon that helps keep them safe. A reactor will have a "Negative Temperature Coefficient of Reactivity". This means that as temperature goes up power output goes down. With proper design vetting this will be true for all conditions, steady-state, transient, or emergency. During a crisis the reactor will respond by naturally shutting down its own nuclear chain reaction. Once thats done the emergency cooling systems simply have to cope with the passive decay heat which follows a natural decay curve.
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Nov 30, 2015 02:46
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e: ^^^^^ That is an awesome postsilence_kit posted:I think that "not anywhere close" is an exaggeration. I don't believe you. Do the calculation. It's a waste of my time to redo a calculation that's been done at least 3 times in this thread already, go look it up. Or instead, let's do something even simpler and convert your own numbers into something more useful so that we can both continue being lazy: the author cites "personal use" and says that putting solar panels on every single roof in the UK wouldn't generate enough to cover "personal use". In the US, roughly 20% of electricity consumption is "personal use". The US also consumes 2.5x as much power per capita as the UK (overall). This would imply that we'd cover less than 8% of total power demand in the US. Even if you decide to throw a really fat uncertainty on that number (as you should) I'd still say anything less than 50% is "not anywhere close", and you definitely can't get up to that with only roof PV. And, again, this doesn't take into account any of the missing information that I mentioned: no redundancy for intermittent production, no additional area for storage, doesn't account for losses due to transmission/transformation/storage/recovery. For that matter, these numbers also only hit the mean yearly demand, when realistically you need to be able to have a lot more capacity than that. "Not anywhere close" is accurate, if we're talking about roof PV alone. quote:I don't think that the energy density will really a huge problem for the continuing build out of the technology, but if you can show otherwise, I'd be interested. The more pressing issue is that it is only suitable for generating the fraction of electricity used during the peak hours of the day. That point has been run into the ground in this thread. It's not a problem, so long as you're willing to pave over huge swathes of countryside. Otherwise, we need to use other power sources, too. quote:I'm also not really committed to running the world on only solar cells. It's an interesting alternate energy source because it, in some places, is more attractive economically than fossil fuels to provide electricity. The solar electricity price is still dropping. Well, I agree with all of this. I think that solar power is great and that we should continue expanding our solar power capacity, including putting PV on every sun-facing roof. I think that government subsidies for residential and commercial PV should be expanded and that we need to stop local utility companies from passing fee hikes on solar users (a disturbing trend taking place in almost-ideal solar power zones like Hawaii and Arizona). I'm even a big enough fan of solar power to have put my money where my mouth is: my roof has PV and solar hot water. But the initial line of thought here was coming from a poster who thought that we could replace all of our power production with renewable sources and that doing this would be ecologically better than using any amount of nuclear power, probably without having ever thought about how much land area you'd need for renewables to meet demand, and definitely without any idea of how much ecological damage is actually caused by nuclear power (almost none at all). QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 03:11 on Nov 30, 2015 |
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Nov 30, 2015 03:05
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M_Gargantua posted:= Look, I'm a huge nuclear power fan (and you made a really good post covering a lot of oft-overlooked issues), but even I've gotta say that that's really glossing over things. Fukushima (and all BWR/PWR designs) have a large negative temperature coefficient of reactivity, but the reactors there still melted down like a motherfuck because the residual decay heat is still sufficient to melt the fuel assembly and the primary containment. I mean, yeah, the answer's "build something newer than a 50+ year-old BWR/PWR design", but negative temperature coefficient alone isn't a panacea for anything bigger than a TRIGA. Not for a power plant.
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Nov 30, 2015 03:13
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M_Gargantua posted:Photo voltaic cells are made of doped silicon. This takes a pure silicon base and deposits quantities (Depending on manufacturer and intended use) of Boron, Arsenic, Phosphorus, Gallium, Antimony, and Indium. For example Gallium and Indium are popular for thin cells. This is irrelevant to the earlier claim that solar cells require scarce elements. When people talk about doping silicon for solar cells or integrated circuits, usually they talk about volumetric concentrations of the dopants and not the fraction of atoms in the semi-conductors that are dopants, but it works out to be an average dopant concentration of ~parts per million in a typical silicon cell. The scarcity of these materials doesn't matter since so little of them are used. Of the more scarce dopants, you mentioned gallium, indium, and antimony. I don't think that gallium and indium are actually used much, and the reason why you'd use antimony over phosphorus as an n-type dopant in a silicon integrated circuit is irrelevant for solar cells. M_Gargantua posted:The cheapest mass produced cells often use Boron/Phosphorus combos. Many alternates like Cadmium Telluride cells are becoming more popular due to efficiency and ease of manufacture but Cadmium is toxic and Tellurium is comparable with platinum in scarcity. Over time the efficiency of cells decline. So for the rest of this post i'm going to make the following assumptions about the cells I don't think that relatively newer cadmium indium gallium selenide (CIGS) cell companies are doing that well. First Solar is a relatively big solar company which makes cadmium telluride solar cells. Both technologies promise a lower manufacturing cost than silicon cells, but I don't think that the manufacturing cost of cells is the biggest cost of solar electricity. It doesn't make sense, at least to me, to be to be a new solar cell company where your competitive advantage is (potentially) lower manufacturing cost. In any case, CdTe or CIGS aren't really slam dunk technologies and I don't see them replacing silicon. You are wrong with respect to their efficiency--their efficiencies are much lower than the best commercial silicon cells. Their only possible advantage is a lower temperature coefficient than silicon, meaning that the cell gets derated slightly less when it gets hot, but this advantage is not great enough to account for the efficiency hit. Regarding all of the stuff you posted about the cost of solar electricity, you have to realize that you are describing a moving target. The cost of solar electricity is still dropping, so talking about how much old projects cost isn't that interesting to me. If you actually have a good prediction for when the cost of solar electricity will stop dropping, I'd be interested in hearing. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 04:02 on Nov 30, 2015 |
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Nov 30, 2015 03:44
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silence_kit posted:Could you show your work? In the online book Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air, the author, who by the way is not really committed to solar energy at all, does a back of the envelope calculation, and concludes that there is enough roof space in not exactly sunny Britain to make a pretty good dent in personal use. It's an old book--he mostly complained about the current production of solar cells being too low and the price being too high, but of course things have changed a lot in the past couple of years. Surely you notice that "putting a pretty good dent in personal use" is a far cry from doing a majority of all use? I mean after all, most electricity use is industrial, and then there's a pretty big amount of commercial. Phanatic posted:Look, I'm a huge nuclear power fan (and you made a really good post covering a lot of oft-overlooked issues), but even I've gotta say that that's really glossing over things. Fukushima (and all BWR/PWR designs) have a large negative temperature coefficient of reactivity, but the reactors there still melted down like a motherfuck because the residual decay heat is still sufficient to melt the fuel assembly and the primary containment. It's worth noting that the Fukushima reactor that melted down and the one nearby that was severely damaged were scheduled for end of life shutdown being well under way by 2013. As such if the tsunami simply happened 2 years later, or even 1 year later, they wouldn't have been in a position to melt down.
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Nov 30, 2015 04:21
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Wasn't there also a post earlier in the thread where someone calculated whether you'd be able to meet national demand if you replaced every square inch of road/highway with solar cells and told everyone not to drive? It was around the time when people were excited about Solar Roads. Whatever happened to that? Nothing, I assume, because replacing asphalt with solar cells is bizarre and wasteful?
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Nov 30, 2015 06:29
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QuarkJets posted:Wasn't there also a post earlier in the thread where someone calculated whether you'd be able to meet national demand if you replaced every square inch of road/highway with solar cells and told everyone not to drive? It was around the time when people were excited about Solar Roads. Whatever happened to that? Nothing, I assume, because replacing asphalt with solar cells is bizarre and wasteful? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obS6TUVSZds Probably the best breakdown on why it was a terrible terrible idea, bordering on a scam. Nice for people that like numbers like me, and amusing. Basically they'd be hard pressed to make enough power to make the LED's on them visible during the day, let alone producing power.
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Nov 30, 2015 07:10
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M_Gargantua posted:[*]High grade nickel steels. These themselves are surprisingly low impact. The components require precice casting and forging and its mostly accomplished with clean electric arc furnaces. Compared to common low carbon steel which still often uses dirtier and cheeper processes. Both types of steel making do produce waste sulfer and slag. This is a pretty insignificant part of your post, but having worked almost a decade at an industrial scale electric arc furnace I felt the need to point out that they are anything but clean.
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Nov 30, 2015 10:14
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Tias posted:I'm not replying to smug assholes who can't see the difference betwen a chemical refinery and a wave energy station. Bye. How about the damaging potential of humanity? You have not established any proof that nuclear is any more dangerous or dirty than any other human endeavour, and using Fukushima is not a point in your favor, in fact despite TEPCOs extreme fuckup mismanaging it, its still a fairly good point in nuclear's favor. Admit it: You don't actually care about the 'impact' of nuclear, since actual metrics and statistics are against the things you claim, you are just easily spooked by the world 'nuclear' CommieGIR fucked around with this message at 15:34 on Nov 30, 2015 |
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Nov 30, 2015 12:08
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Seriously when are people going to stop confusing "rare earth metals" with "metals that are rare/scarce." The actual cost of acquiring or using those elements has almost nothing to do with that classification.
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Nov 30, 2015 15:32
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M_Gargantua posted:
 An excellent post.
CommieGIR fucked around with this message at 15:41 on Nov 30, 2015 |
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Nov 30, 2015 15:36
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TheRat posted:This is a pretty insignificant part of your post, but having worked almost a decade at an industrial scale electric arc furnace I felt the need to point out that they are anything but clean. What sort of byproducts does an electric arc furnace create?
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Nov 30, 2015 19:59
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Grognan posted:What sort of byproducts does an electric arc furnace create? (Literally) Tons of slag, sulphur and heavy metals. You do your best to collect the slag and exhaust fumes, but even if you get 100% it still has to go somewhere. Now you have to dump or reprocess a large amount of fine dust thats a mixture of heavy metals, calcium, sulphur and whatever slag byproducts was skimmed off of the molten steel.
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Nov 30, 2015 20:19
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Also if you go on a plant floor anywhere near one you feel dirty for days. Industrial furnaces like that will burn off every impurity in the material and it gets everywhere
hobbesmaster fucked around with this message at 20:57 on Nov 30, 2015 |
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Nov 30, 2015 20:55
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Phanatic posted:Look, I'm a huge nuclear power fan (and you made a really good post covering a lot of oft-overlooked issues), but even I've gotta say that that's really glossing over things. Fukushima (and all BWR/PWR designs) have a large negative temperature coefficient of reactivity, but the reactors there still melted down like a motherfuck because the residual decay heat is still sufficient to melt the fuel assembly and the primary containment. I'm not saying its a panacea. Its solid physics for which engineered safety systems can be designed. Fukushima suffered from a number of unauthorized modifications TEPCO made to the approved design for the emergency cooling systems. Decay heat is an engineering problem. Nuclear safety is an engineering problem. One we're becoming very well versed in. And much like solar any increase in production scale will drive the cost of building nuclear plants even lower. silence_kit posted:This is irrelevant to the earlier claim that solar cells require scarce elements. When people talk about doping silicon for solar cells or integrated circuits, usually they talk about volumetric concentrations of the dopants and not the fraction of atoms in the semi-conductors that are dopants, but it works out to be an average dopant concentration of ~parts per million in a typical silicon cell. The scarcity of these materials doesn't matter since so little of them are used. Of the more scarce dopants, you mentioned gallium, indium, and antimony. I don't think that gallium and indium are actually used much, and the reason why you'd use antimony over phosphorus as an n-type dopant in a silicon integrated circuit is irrelevant for solar cells. I'm not arguing for the specific types of dopants for Solar, thats not something i'm familiar with. The reason why the dopants are a concern is not the "parts per million" useage, but the fact that in some cases "parts per million" in ground water can be toxic. Proper industrial controls limit the risk during production. Mining these elements also creates enviromental hazards. Theres a limit to what you can do. Silicon and Steel production both have industrial waste. We've got a lot of experience dealing with the heavy metal hazards of steel. The PV industry will suffer growing pains dealing with some of the lighter toxic materials they work with. quote:I don't think that relatively newer cadmium indium gallium selenide (CIGS) cell companies are doing that well. First Solar is a relatively big solar company which makes cadmium telluride solar cells. Both technologies promise a lower manufacturing cost than silicon cells, but I don't think that the manufacturing cost of cells is the biggest cost of solar electricity. It doesn't make sense, at least to me, to be to be a new solar cell company where your competitive advantage is (potentially) lower manufacturing cost. In any case, CdTe or CIGS aren't really slam dunk technologies and I don't see them replacing silicon. Everything I've read about them places them at the same efficiency of polycrystaline cells. Being lighter weight this saves on shipping and installation costs for large projects. Equal or better lifetime efficiency retention helps. So reduced manufacturing cost really does make a dent in overall price. It may have a future depending on market forces. I think it has enough market share to be seen as continually viable going forward. quote:Regarding all of the stuff you posted about the cost of solar electricity, you have to realize that you are describing a moving target. The cost of solar electricity is still dropping, so talking about how much old projects cost isn't that interesting to me. If you actually have a good prediction for when the cost of solar electricity will stop dropping, I'd be interested in hearing. This is a matter of funding. I'd bet a nuclear plant will beat a solar plant for $/MW Given the same amount of research funding. Sadly all the money is in solar due to the N word. Money in "Nuclear" is a risky political bet. The only way to know would be to fund both going forward. So our only option now is to look back at historical data. Historical data has nuclear being similar to solar in price and price history.
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Nov 30, 2015 21:41
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Effectronica posted:I actually did major in physics, as it happens, but, "Killer-of-Lawyers", the point is that "blowfish" is, from all appearances, talking out of his rear end. Ideally, he would have provided some justification for "dose limits are too low!", that inerrant macaw's squawk of the nuclear cultist. This is unlikely to ever happen, alas for him. Interesting. Of course, linear no-threshold models are pretty well understood to be very flawed, but are used because they are the most conservative possible theory. I have yet to learn of a natural process where behavior at the low end can be accurately predicted by observing behavior at the high end and drawing a line from there to the origin. But that's not as good as when you read people claiming that reports show some small number of uSv/person, and then they add all those downward extrapolated risks together to get an estimated number of deaths. Especially when those reports always say to not do exactly that because it's wrong.
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Nov 30, 2015 22:25
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In nuke news, apparently Also correction on my earlier statement on France not building any EPRs, I forgot about the (very late, over budget) build at Flamanville, it's the second French EPR in Penly that didn't get built originally. suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 22:38 on Nov 30, 2015 |
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Nov 30, 2015 22:35
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silence_kit posted:Could you show your work? In the online book Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air, the author, who by the way is not really committed to solar energy at all, does a back of the envelope calculation, and concludes that there is enough roof space in not exactly sunny Britain to make a pretty good dent in personal use. It's an old book--he mostly complained about the current production of solar cells being too low and the price being too high, but of course things have changed a lot in the past couple of years. There is a significant problem with using solar PV to put a dent in personal consumption in the UK. The summer is the period of minimum demand. The period of peak demand is weekday evenings in winter, when the increase in consumption from people getting home and doing things like cooking and watching TV coincides with the peak in demand from lighting, while industrial and commercial use hasn't begun to fall. This is typically the period 16:00 to 19:00. During this time, the output from all of the solar PV that's scattered across rooftops is nil. The upshot of this is that you need to build (or maintain) a load of flexible, dispatchable generation in order to meet peak demand, that's going to sit idle for much of the year while being displaced in the merit order of running plant by solar PV. As the solar PV has zero cost of generation per kWh, it'll generate whenever it can, pushing prices downwards, and reducing its income with time. On the other hand, when there's scarcity of supply, the gas stations that have sat on their arse for most of the year proceed to rent seek and charge the grid something like $3,700/MWh to meet peak demand.
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Dec 1, 2015 01:06
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M_Gargantua posted:I'm not arguing for the specific types of dopants for Solar, thats not something i'm familiar with. The reason why the dopants are a concern is not the "parts per million" useage, but the fact that in some cases "parts per million" in ground water can be toxic. Proper industrial controls limit the risk during production. Mining these elements also creates enviromental hazards. Theres a limit to what you can do. Silicon and Steel production both have industrial waste. We've got a lot of experience dealing with the heavy metal hazards of steel. The PV industry will suffer growing pains dealing with some of the lighter toxic materials they work with. I would be shocked if the environmental impact of the boron and phosphorus in silicon were substantial, given that the amount needed is so small and when they are in the silicon, they are totally benign. If you are worried about the synthesis of the dopant chemical precursors or their waste during the silicon production, I think you probably would focus on the ingredients which are more heavily used in the production. The focus on the environmental impact of the dilute dopants in the silicon is really bizarre to me. If you actually can meaningfully compare the pollution/chemical waste generated by the production silicon solar cells to the waste of other types of energy generation sources or other industry, I would be interested in hearing it. Some people in this thread grumble about solar cell manufacturing creating pollution, but they never actually meaningfully make a comparison with other types of industrial activity. M_Gargantua posted:This is a matter of funding. I'd bet a nuclear plant will beat a solar plant for $/MW Given the same amount of research funding. Sadly all the money is in solar due to the N word. Money in "Nuclear" is a risky political bet. The only way to know would be to fund both going forward. So our only option now is to look back at historical data. Historical data has nuclear being similar to solar in price and price history. If you add up all of the research money adjusted for inflation over time for both nuclear energy and solar energy, I would really be shocked if solar cell research turned out to be more heavily funded by the US government than nuclear research. Doing solar cell research is also way cheaper than nuclear energy research. For example, there was a guy who would pop in just to harass me in this thread and he claimed that he did a Ph.D. on oddball types of solar cells that you can make in a chemistry wet lab. Now granted, his solar cell material was junk opto-electronic material, and his cells probably didn't work very well, but the US Dept. of Energy for a while really believed that silicon would always be too expensive and funded those types of projects. There's no way that nuclear energy research could be cheaper than paying for a graduate student to work in a chemistry wet lab. Do you really think that the cost of nuclear electricity would drop if the government were to shovel more money into science projects in nuclear energy? silence_kit fucked around with this message at 05:28 on Dec 1, 2015 |
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Dec 1, 2015 04:17
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silence_kit posted:If you add up all of the research money adjusted for inflation over time for both nuclear energy and solar energy, I would really be shocked if solar cell research turned out to be more heavily funded by the US government than nuclear research. Doing solar cell research is way cheaper than nuclear energy research. You can't turn solar panels into weapons
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Dec 1, 2015 05:24
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Bolow posted:You can't turn solar panels into weapons https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtzRAjW6KO0
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Dec 1, 2015 05:49
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silence_kit posted:I would be shocked if the environmental impact of the boron and phosphorus in silicon were substantial, given that the amount needed is so small and when they are in the silicon, they are totally benign. If you are worried about the synthesis of the dopant chemical precursors or their waste during the silicon production, I think you probably would focus on the ingredients which are more heavily used in the production. The focus on the environmental impact of the dilute dopants in the silicon is really bizarre to me. You don't have to resort to conjecture, you can just go look at how much we spend on nuclear power R&D and solar power R&D. Let's ask the people who actually study this: the Energy Information Administration (EIA) 2013 Solar R&D: $284 million 2013 Nuclear R&D: $406 million Note that if you start counting subsidies and direct spending, then solar power receives about 3x more money than nuclear power; a lot of this is due to the government directly paying solar power producers ($3 billion) whereas we apparently don't do this much for producers of nuclear power ($37 million)
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Dec 1, 2015 07:16
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QuarkJets posted:You don't have to resort to conjecture, you can just go look at how much we spend on nuclear power R&D and solar power R&D. Let's ask the people who actually study this: the Energy Information Administration (EIA) The federal Solar Investment Tax Credit expires in 2016 so that'll be interesting.
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Dec 1, 2015 07:42
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silence_kit posted:Do you really think that the cost of nuclear electricity would drop if the government were to shovel more money into science projects in nuclear energy? Yes, but I suspect particularly if very applied stuff such as radiation safety and reactor design and not just development of breeders for 2050 deployment become a main focus that gets more than a token amount of funding. For instance, that's precisely what the small modular reactor programme has set out to do (we will see whether it turned out well within 5-10 years). It would also be funny to see what would happen if the US government told everyone building new nuclear in the US to do so through a common American  nuclear power framework (kinda similar to how Boeing and Lockmart were told to stop bitching and form ULA for rockets) to enforce a coherent South Korea style rollout instead of dumb patchwork that ends up costing more because it's the same as a rollout of [number of power stations built] seperate small-country nuclear rollouts. Naturally, this will never happen, but at least we're in practice down to Westinghouse, GE, and EDF being large consolidated companies so we won't see dozens of styles of reactors with a few units each somewhere across the country.
suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 10:56 on Dec 1, 2015 |
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Dec 1, 2015 10:52
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obS6TUVSZds Probably the best breakdown on why it was a terrible terrible idea, bordering on a scam. Nice for people that like numbers like me, and amusing. Apparently the test solar (bike?) road performed better than expected, but youll have to wait a few hours before I'll be able to pull up the source.
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Dec 1, 2015 11:41
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Communist Zombie posted:Apparently the test solar (bike?) road performed better than expected, but youll have to wait a few hours before I'll be able to pull up the source. "better than expected" doesn't say much because even the theoretical maximum performance would be "same as a regular solar panel but more expensive". suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 13:20 on Dec 1, 2015 |
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Dec 1, 2015 13:17
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Bolow posted:You can't turn solar panels into weapons You can't turn spent fuel into weapons either, and power reactor research has precious little to do with nuclear weapons development. Nuclear weapons tech and nuclear power tech are connected by virtue of using the same chemical elements but after that nearly everything about them is different.
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Dec 1, 2015 14:45
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Bolow posted:You can't turn solar panels into weapons Most of what comes out of reactors is not weapons grade.
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Dec 1, 2015 15:21
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ductonius posted:You can't turn spent fuel into weapons either, and power reactor research has precious little to do with nuclear weapons development. Nuclear weapons tech and nuclear power tech are connected by virtue of using the same chemical elements but after that nearly everything about them is different. You absolutely can turn spent fuel into weapons material with the right amount of burnup. Anyone using the current style LWRs with LEU could, hypothetically, make weapons material. You could also make a dirty bomb out of spent fuel!
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Dec 1, 2015 15:43
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Phayray posted:You absolutely can turn spent fuel into weapons material with the right amount of burnup. Anyone using the current style LWRs with LEU could, hypothetically, make weapons material. You could also make a dirty bomb out of spent fuel! That isn't the problem, its the amount of refining and separating needed to get to that point.
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Dec 1, 2015 15:49
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Communist Zombie posted:Apparently the test solar (bike?) road performed better than expected, but youll have to wait a few hours before I'll be able to pull up the source. "Better than expected": http://www.sciencealert.com/solar-roads-in-the-netherlands-are-working-even-better-than-expected quote:Now, six months into the trial, engineers say the system is working even better than expected, with the 70-metre test bike path generating 3,000 kWh, or enough electricity to power a small household for a year. Yeah, about that. 70 meters long, about 1.75 meters wide, that's 122.5 square meters. 3000 kWh divided by 122.5 square meters = 24.5 kWh/square meter/6 months or ~50 kWh/square meter/year. That's actually just about exactly in line with their expectations, they 70kwh figure is a peak figure, and the thing's producing about half as much output as a roof-mounted system in the same area, which is way less expensive because it doesn't need to double as a bike path. Such a bike path would never, ever pay for its own installation cost. http://jalopnik.com/that-fancy-new-solar-bike-path-in-amsterdam-is-utter-bu-1708232432 Phayray posted:You absolutely can turn spent fuel into weapons material with the right amount of burnup. Anyone using the current style LWRs with LEU could, hypothetically, make weapons material. You could also make a dirty bomb out of spent fuel! This would be so difficult as to be effectively impossible. "The right amount of burnup" means "hardly any burnup at all," because you can't leave the U-238 in the reactor for very long at all before the buildup of Pu-240 becomes too high. With a LWR, if you wanted to generate Pu-239 with a low enough % of Pu-240 to build a bomb, you'd be pulling all the fuel elements out and replacing them at least every month or two. Dirty bombs are way overrated as a threat. Phanatic fucked around with this message at 16:04 on Dec 1, 2015 |
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Dec 1, 2015 15:56
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Communist Zombie posted:Apparently the test solar (bike?) road performed better than expected, but youll have to wait a few hours before I'll be able to pull up the source. The solar bike road shattered due to wear (and I think winter temperatures?) in a few places, and that was with it only having to carry the load of bikes. And what it was expected to perform like was total poo poo, so the fact that it performed a bit better left it still performing horribly, in comparison to something like, the exact same route but the solar panels were placed over top the path as a form of sunshade/roof. South Korea actually has a few places where they built bike paths down the center of dreeways with walls to protect you from the cars and solar panel roofs on top tilted towards the south for maximal sunlight, which also provides shade and rain protection, and that is capable of producing more than twice as much power while being far more durable. Here's one of the places the dutch bike path solar road broke:  Phanatic posted:Such a bike path would never, ever pay for its own installation cost. Hey now it could! If electricity prices jumped 30x-50x and the installation and maintenance costs didn't.
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Dec 1, 2015 16:02
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CommieGIR posted:That isn't the problem, its the amount of refining and separating needed to get to that point. I didn't say it was easy, just that it's possible, refuting ductonius' claim that "You can't turn spent fuel into weapons either".
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Dec 1, 2015 16:03
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Phayray posted:I didn't say it was easy, just that it's possible, refuting ductonius' claim that "You can't turn spent fuel into weapons either". Correct. It's just incredibly prohibitive to do depending upon the reactor, the waste, and the reprocessing capabilities.
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Dec 1, 2015 16:09
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