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https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20141016150225-37235184-is-germany-s-green-turning-brown Energiewende costs Germany 100 bn euros, 4.5 trillion over the lifetime of the program. Just to feel good about not having any nuclear, and burning more coal all the while. Seriously depressing.
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Oct 22, 2014 02:18
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SKELETONS posted:https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20141016150225-37235184-is-germany-s-green-turning-brown I mean, we've talked about this before in this thread but can we do better than a linkedin.com blog post by a self-proclaimed "Expert Digital Media Consultant, Professional Speaker, TV Show Host, Environmentalist & Nuclear Advocate"? (Don't get me wrong, its not the nuke part of that title that annoys me). Even the WSJ's coverage is better: http://online.wsj.com/articles/germanys-expensive-gamble-on-renewable-energy-1409106602
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Oct 22, 2014 03:34
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Store nuclear waste behind a paywall? That IS a place no reasonable person would ever look, not even primitive future civilizations.
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Oct 22, 2014 03:52
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I only posted it because it was the first time I'd seen that set of numbers, you're right though.
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Oct 22, 2014 03:56
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http://www.commonsnews.org/site/site05/story.php?articleno=10872&page=1#.VEgOkRZfqHsquote:A 2008 comparison of the life cycle of nuclear found that while it beats coal, oil, and gas, nuclear emits 66 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent per kilowatt hour, compared to 9 to 10 grams for wind power, 10 to 13 grams for hydroelectric power, and 32 grams for solar photovoltaic power. Anyone know where these numbers come from? They seem really unlikely to me. Especially the wind one.
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Oct 22, 2014 21:09
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Unkempt posted:http://www.commonsnews.org/site/site05/story.php?articleno=10872&page=1#.VEgOkRZfqHs I asked around and it seems that those numbers are fairly normal for wind et al if you include the embodied costs of the steel, concrete etc.
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Oct 22, 2014 21:29
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Trabisnikof posted:I asked around and it seems that those numbers are fairly normal for wind et al if you include the embodied costs of the steel, concrete etc. I thought it was unlikely the numbers were that low, actually.
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Oct 22, 2014 21:32
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Unkempt posted:http://www.commonsnews.org/site/site05/story.php?articleno=10872&page=1#.VEgOkRZfqHs How do you think protestants get to the castor transports?
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Oct 22, 2014 21:35
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Unkempt posted:http://www.commonsnews.org/site/site05/story.php?articleno=10872&page=1#.VEgOkRZfqHs As much as it hurts to link wikipedia, it contains both the numbers cited, along with criticism of said numbers, and also newer studies done by other groups that show vastly different numbers. I don't really have time to dig into the sources but yeah, from 500 yards up it looks like the author did a meta-analysis but averaged in the same result a bunch of times(as cited in many other papers), and only for nuclear to belabor his point. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse-gas_emissions_of_energy_sources
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Oct 22, 2014 21:37
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Specifically, this is Sovacool's meta-analysis http://www.nirs.org/climate/background/sovacool_nuclear_ghg.pdf And this is the problem with it: quote:The remaining 19 studies met all criteria: they were published Elotana fucked around with this message at 22:33 on Oct 22, 2014 |
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Oct 22, 2014 22:28
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Well, lets get some valid methods up in this house: http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/57187.pdf 
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Oct 22, 2014 22:36
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A substantial portion of the current carbon cost of nuclear will be due to burning fossil fuels to get raw materials for building the power plant to the site. Going nuclear enables electric/synthetic fuel transportation on a large scale. If the opposition to nuclear can talk about obviously predictable future developments in solar then I will talk about obviously predictable developments in nuclear
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Oct 22, 2014 22:45
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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blowfish posted:A substantial portion of the current carbon cost of nuclear will be due to burning fossil fuels to get raw materials for building the power plant to the site. Going nuclear enables electric/synthetic fuel transportation on a large scale. If the opposition to nuclear can talk about obviously predictable future developments in solar then I will talk about obviously predictable developments in nuclear I don't think we get to use the post-nuclear/post-solar/post-OTEC electric transportation fleet to build the power plants that enabled the electric fleet to begin with, no matter which wonderkin technology we're using. Sure in 50-80+ years when we're building the next-next gen that'll be low carbon, but its fair to assume current-gen means of production for making the next-gen.
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Oct 22, 2014 23:04
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Thanks, should have checked wikipedia. So quote:Studies since then attempting to prove nuclear is low carbon have been widely debunked as using out-of-date or skewed data.
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Oct 22, 2014 23:43
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Trabisnikof posted:I don't think we get to use the post-nuclear/post-solar/post-OTEC electric transportation fleet to build the power plants that enabled the electric fleet to begin with, no matter which wonderkin technology we're using. Sure in 50-80+ years when we're building the next-next gen that'll be low carbon, but its fair to assume current-gen means of production for making the next-gen. Well we can't use the wind and solar thing to build a transportation fleet either, genius.
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Oct 22, 2014 23:45
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Nintendo Kid posted:Well we can't use the wind and solar thing to build a transportation fleet either, genius. My point being, no matter how you get to magical 0 carbon-equivalent emissions electricity, you can't use the result of your new magical power system to build the system in the first place.
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Oct 23, 2014 00:43
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The point is that it is just a one-time bootstrapping cost, not a cost that will be incurred every time we increase power supply capability or replace a reactor. We could probably build one and use it entirely to build the next one and so on and not release much carbon at all but that's kind of silly.
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Oct 23, 2014 00:47
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Jeffrey posted:The point is that it is just a one-time bootstrapping cost, not a cost that will be incurred every time we increase power supply capability or replace a reactor. We could probably build one and use it entirely to build the next one and so on and not release much carbon at all but that's kind of silly. But that's true for every single magical 0 carbon electricity solution. In a post-100% OTEC/post-nuclear/space-solar/hipsters-on-bikes driven economy the carbon footprint of steel, concrete, etc will be vastly reduced. So whenever next-next-gen occurs, yes the footprint will be much smaller. Then if you take climate into account, it really doesn't matter as much how much sunk carbon-cost is associated with new power plants in 80-100 years, it matters much more how much carbon we emit in the next 50 years, and how much emissions are locked in for 30-50 years as we age out a new fleet.
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Oct 23, 2014 00:54
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Trabisnikof posted:But that's true for every single magical 0 carbon electricity solution. In a post-100% OTEC/post-nuclear/space-solar/hipsters-on-bikes driven economy the carbon footprint of steel, concrete, etc will be vastly reduced. So whenever next-next-gen occurs, yes the footprint will be much smaller. I would say that the biggest concern is variable costs associated with increasing demand for power and not so much the fixed costs associated with building plants once. If the amount of carbon released to build plants is relatively low compared to 50 years worth of carbon release of the old vs the new system, it doesn't matter what the amortized amount of carbon per MW is. If it really is large enough to matter, we can bootstrap it by only spending carbon to build enough plants to source an alternative-energy plant production system, and then build them all using that. The amount of carbon released to build the first plant doesn't have to equal the amount of carbon released to build the 50th plant in a staged rollout. edit: Though I guess any power diverted for building new plants is just power not replacing fossil fuels so it's kind of the same. There's not really any getting around construction costs of plants requiring carbon emission. Jeffrey of YOSPOS fucked around with this message at 01:23 on Oct 23, 2014 |
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Oct 23, 2014 01:06
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Jeffrey posted:I would say that the biggest concern is variable costs associated with increasing demand for power and not so much the fixed costs associated with building plants once. If the amount of carbon released to build plants is relatively low compared to 50 years worth of carbon release of the old vs the new system, it doesn't matter what the amortized amount of carbon per MW is. If it really is large enough to matter, we can bootstrap it by only spending carbon to build enough plants to source an alternative-energy plant production system, and then build them all using that. The amount of carbon released to build the first plant doesn't have to equal the amount of carbon released to build the 50th plant in a staged rollout. There is a lot of validity to the argument that the faster we can bring low/~0 carbon energy sources online the quicker we can reduce our sunk costs for growth and replacement. I'm just saying that anyone can't use the power from a ~0 carbon grid to build that same ~0 carbon grid, regardless of technology. Likewise, regardless of technology, any ~0 carbon grid would gain the benefits of having reduced sunk carbon impacts because of the ~0 carbon cost of electricity.
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Oct 23, 2014 01:24
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Is yucca mountain proposal dead for good or is it something that could be revitalized in the future. My only personal concern with nuclear is that we can't pull the trigger on where to store waste long term.
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Oct 23, 2014 12:50
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JohnGalt posted:Is yucca mountain proposal dead for good or is it something that could be revitalized in the future. My only personal concern with nuclear is that we can't pull the trigger on where to store waste long term. It's probably dead. It probably would have been the only good thing done by a Republican legislature/president. The government will probably turn to a industry-based solution, and keep shuffling waste, building new storage capacity at existing sites, putting spent fuel into dry cask storage as it cools, and passing the buck for the next couple decades. If a plant closes, move its waste to another plant in that fleet. If a fleet closes up shop, have it pay another fleet to take its waste. Right now? The Republican solution is to ignore nuclear in favor of gas/coal/oil. The Democratic solution is to kill nuclear power to open a wide open hole for solar and wind to fill (ignore Energiewende, that was a fluke!). Only the NRC have a real interest in dealing with nuclear power, and they've been generating unfunded mandates that add to the costs of NPP O&M. Public attitude toward nuclear in America doesn't seem as bad as it has in past decades, even given Fukushima. Political, economic, and regulatory factors are what stifle the addition of new capacity beyond a few existing sites adding an extra unit or two (STP, VC Summer, Vogtle). The fuel storage is a nice allegory to nuclear power on the whole, as a relatively simple engineering challenge is rendered impossible by politics.
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Oct 23, 2014 14:54
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JohnGalt posted:The fuel storage is a nice allegory to nuclear power on the whole, as a relatively simple engineering challenge is rendered impossible by politics. It's really the same issue when you get to the nitty gritty. People hear 'nuclear' and see in their head Fallout radiation zombies. When they stop NIMBYing the plants they'll probably stop NIMBYing the storage at the same time.
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Oct 23, 2014 15:03
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Nevvy Z posted:It's really the same issue when you get to the nitty gritty. People hear 'nuclear' and see in their head Fallout radiation zombies. When they stop NIMBYing the plants they'll probably stop NIMBYing the storage at the same time. It's also politics. Plenty of things without mass support that aren't well known still can move forward if one or the other party likes them. Irrational fear isn't what held back Yucca, it was simply politicians not seeing any gain in pushing it. Neither party sees a victory in promoting nuclear for the reason I pointed out in my last post.
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Oct 23, 2014 15:13
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Pander posted:It probably would have been the only good thing done by a Republican legislature/president. And really not even that good, because the correct thing to do with our spent fuel stockpile is reprocess and burn it - spent fuel is about 95% U-238, there's no (good) reason to just bury it. This has the added benefit of reducing the volume of stuff you ultimately need to bury. Obviously we will eventually need a place to put the waste, but the silver lining to Yucca Mountain being indefinitely postponed is that at least there's still a shot of picking up reprocessing, which would be a lot harder to do if we were already burying our spent fuel. Phayray fucked around with this message at 16:20 on Oct 23, 2014 |
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Oct 23, 2014 15:56
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Phayray posted:And really not even that good, because the correct thing to do with our spent fuel stockpile is reprocess and burn it - spent fuel is about 95% U-238, there's no (good) reason to just bury it. This has the added benefit of reducing the volume of stuff you ultimately need to bury. The problem with reprocessing is that nobody has the money or willpower to do it. In other nations it's basically required a nuclear-focused energy structure with governments working in concert with industry, not relatively at odds with one another. The benefit to Yucca Mountain would have been the elimination of a long-standing criticism of nuclear power and the presentation of an industry-wide plan, instead of ad-hoc waste storage.
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Oct 23, 2014 16:30
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Its not something that another president could reignite then? Also, how scientifically solid was it to put there? I work with a guy who was a hydrogeologist involved with the project in some capacity and he swears that it was a case of science providing the best possible solution (from a geologic perspective) and there was no real reason to oppose it.
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Oct 23, 2014 18:59
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Don't people in this thread get tired of whining about how nuclear energy is politically unpopular in the US? Do we really need to devote another 60 pages of this thread to this subject?
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Oct 23, 2014 20:04
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JohnGalt posted:Its not something that another president could reignite then? Also, how scientifically solid was it to put there? I work with a guy who was a hydrogeologist involved with the project in some capacity and he swears that it was a case of science providing the best possible solution (from a geologic perspective) and there was no real reason to oppose it. silence_kit posted:Don't people in this thread get tired of whining about how nuclear energy is politically unpopular in the US? Do we really need to devote another 60 pages of this thread to this subject?
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Oct 23, 2014 20:10
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JohnGalt posted:Its not something that another president could reignite then? Also, how scientifically solid was it to put there? I work with a guy who was a hydrogeologist involved with the project in some capacity and he swears that it was a case of science providing the best possible solution (from a geologic perspective) and there was no real reason to oppose it. Even if the president wanted to utilize it, it would still have to run through Congress. Nobody in Congress would actively push for it, and you better believe so long as Harry Reid runs the Senate it'd never see the light of day due to literal NIMBYism. There is no political gain in it. As much as there may be a shifting perception of nuclear due to docus like Pandora's Promise, the bases of both parties oppose Yucca Mountain. Conservatives don't see the point of it when coal and nat'l gas are so plentiful (and gently caress global warming), and liberals tend toward anti-nuclear driven by single issue scientific ignorance. When your coalition is moderate conservatives who recognize the threat of global warming and moderate liberals who understand the technological limitations of attempting to green without nuclear, you're not going to get very far in today's American political climate.
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Oct 23, 2014 20:21
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silence_kit posted:Don't people in this thread get tired of whining about how nuclear energy is politically unpopular in the US? Do we really need to devote another 60 pages of this thread to this subject? This thread is pretty much the Bechtel Home for Old Nuke Believers. It doesn't matter the topic, we're always three posts away from "if only everything was nuclear".
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Oct 23, 2014 20:28
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Rent-A-Cop posted:Not going to happen with Harry Reid in the Senate. I should be a little more charitable now, I guess. Pander here is actually analyzing and talking about the politics of nuclear energy. This is to be contrasted with the majority of the posts in this thread on the subject which are just little tantrums.
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Oct 23, 2014 20:29
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Trabisnikof posted:This thread is pretty much the Bechtel Home for Old Nuke Believers. It doesn't matter the topic, we're always three posts away from "if only everything was nuclear". Don't forget you're in D&D. It's not the Bechtel Home for Old Nuke Believers, it's the TVA Home for Old Nuke Believers around here.
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Oct 23, 2014 20:46
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Trabisnikof posted:This thread is pretty much the Bechtel Home for Old Nuke Believers. It doesn't matter the topic, we're always three posts away from "if only everything was nuclear". Getting back to a previous discussion I didn't quite get a good handle on... blowfish posted:A substantial portion of the current carbon cost of nuclear will be due to burning fossil fuels to get raw materials for building the power plant to the site. Going nuclear enables electric/synthetic fuel transportation on a large scale. If the opposition to nuclear can talk about obviously predictable future developments in solar then I will talk about obviously predictable developments in nuclear 2) Is nuclear power construction more carbon expensive on a per-KW basis than other types of green power construction (solar, wind)? Almost every power source involves taking things from one part of the world to another. Wouldn't the compressed and dense nature of nuclear tend to make it more efficient to construct than a decentralized green source? 3) What does the opposition to nuclear assume with regards to its predictable future developments that it fails to similarly credit for nuclear? Is this a general complaint, or is there an egregious example?
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Oct 23, 2014 21:03
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silence_kit posted:Don't people in this thread get tired of whining about how nuclear energy is politically unpopular in the US? Do we really need to devote another 60 pages of this thread to this subject? Well, we could talk about how awesome wind power is, and how we should be pouring huge amounts of investment into building wind farms everywhere. But that's actually... basically happening. Sure, it could use more investment (to come sooner), but the curve looks exponential, and it's probably going to turn logistic with an asymptote somewhere around 60+% of our average electrical power. That's the point where wind's drawbacks actually start to apply. But that'll be a huge improvement, it's happening, it's cheap, and there's every reason to be optimistic there. At that point, we need grid storage and, except in a few places where there's lots of hydro or extremely favorable conditions for solar, nuclear. I'm a bit hopeful the liquid metal battery tech will pan out, and that could be a big part of the solution to the first problem. And for nuclear, basically all we need is political will. I don't think it's "whining" to talk about it. The political obstacle is essential to overcome eventually, because there's pretty much no other choice for that last 30% or so of electrical generation.
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Oct 23, 2014 21:21
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Pander posted:I'd like to think everyone who posts in this thread is hopeful, whatever means of energy generation they prefer. An informal majority does believe that nuclear fission would be the best large scale source of electrical energy, and discusses such. I don't think the past page has been particularly bad or sycophantic in a pro-nuclear way. I agree this thread has been more reasonable as of late, but the whole "if you don't think nuclear is out only option you must be scientifically ignorant" canard was still brought up once this page. crazypenguin posted:There's pretty much no other choice for that last 30% or so of electrical generation. That's just not true. You can argue that 30% nuclear is the best alternative for the future, but by no means is it the only ~0-carbon alternative. There's a great NREL study looking into 90% renewables in 2050 without nuclear (http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy12osti/52409-1.pdf). On the hippier side you've got the Wind/Water/Sunlight plans that come out of Stanford (http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/USStatesWWS.pdf). On the more realistic but less ideologically pure side you've got the Reinventing Fire plan out of Rocky Mountain Institute (http://www.rmi.org/ReinventingFire). I could go on. That's what disables a lot of the meatier discussions here, the idea that there is only one acceptable solution. If we can move to the ideological middle ground and accept that there are many workable solutions, then we can engage on evaluating the promises and pitfalls of each.
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Oct 23, 2014 21:32
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Pander posted:1) Is a substantial portion of the assumed carbon cost of nuclear power related to its construction? I don't know where to find real numbers, but I believe a huge part of nuclear CO2 emissions come from concrete. Concrete involves a lot of CO2 emissions. Nuclear reactors are pretty big concrete structures. I know the ridiculously high numbers for nuclear power come from someone just taking construction costs and flat out assuming a particular emissions per dollar number. Which is about as wildly inaccurate as you might guess.
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Oct 23, 2014 21:33
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crazypenguin posted:Well, we could talk about how awesome wind power is, and how we should be pouring huge amounts of investment into building wind farms everywhere. Ultimately, I guess that is the point, at this point wind seems the most possible route for a transition to non-carbon sources at this point, not from a technical standpoint but from a political one. Ideally it would be a mix of nuclear among renewable sources, based on a efficient utilization of base load and geography. However, we are right now in a situation where nuclear power popularity is dim and will likely stay that way for a while. In addition, economically things are not going well in a lot of countries which is only going to complicate the matter since nuclear has a large initial capital investment. At least as far as the US, I don't see nuclear disappearing and currently it is around 18-20% of electrical generation, so that is something. In addition, there is the possibility of other renewelables filling in some of the gaps, Hydro is around 6% then there are small amounts of other renewelables. Granted, I think 60% Wind Power may be optimistic especially if we don't figure out grid storage in the near future.
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Oct 23, 2014 21:35
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crazypenguin posted:I don't know where to find real numbers, but I believe a huge part of nuclear CO2 emissions come from concrete. Concrete involves a lot of CO2 emissions. Nuclear reactors are pretty big concrete structures. NREL has a great site about this issue: http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/sustain_lca_results.html if you read the report, they link to all the published LCAs of nuclear power plants that meet their methodological criteria. On the nuclear page: quote:Assuming consistent performance characteristics, the median LC GHG emissions estimates were nearly identical for PWR and BWR technologies after harmonization. The median life cycle GHG emission estimates for PWR and BWR technology types are 14 and 21 g CO2eq/kWh, respectively, as published, and 12 and 13 g CO2eq/kWh, respectively after harmonization. But to your specific question, yes most of nuclear's carbon cost comes from the sunk carbon for the concrete, steel, etc.
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Oct 23, 2014 21:40
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Ardennes posted:Ultimately, I guess that is the point, at this point wind seems the most possible route for a transition to non-carbon sources at this point, not from a technical standpoint but from a political one. ... Actually, I do think wind is the best technical solution. I didn't used to, but the deeper I looked into it... It really does have the lowest costs and lowest CO2 emission too out of all the options we can really deploy widely. And 60% probably doesn't need grid storage yet! I was surprised when I discovered this, but it turns out you can push it up to somewhere around that point and compensate for variability by just adjusting output from other sources. It's actually... easy. The output is so predictable, you have enough time to adjust even coal, nevermind natural gas. It's only when you want to push it higher that the variability becomes a real problem and you need storage. Iowa is already at 27% wind and as far as I know, the only problem they have is that they don't have the infrastructure to sell power to neighboring states efficiently enough for their tastes.  Trabisnikof posted:There's a great NREL study looking into 90% renewables in 2050 without nuclear (http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy12osti/52409-1.pdf). On the hippier side you've got the Wind/Water/Sunlight plans that come out of Stanford (http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/USStatesWWS.pdf). On the more realistic but less ideologically pure side you've got the Reinventing Fire plan out of Rocky Mountain Institute (http://www.rmi.org/ReinventingFire). I could go on. I want to read all of these, I need more hours in the day drat it. I've just read the executive summary for the first one, and... well... First, their realistic plan is to get to 80%. So, I'd be off by saying there's no good option for the last 20% instead of 30%. However, looking at their numbers, they rely on biomass a lot to actually achieve this. I'm not sure I'd want to? Perhaps this is covered later in the paper, but it seems to me that if we don't use biomass, then we'd be effectively sequestering some of that carbon, which would be nice.
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Oct 23, 2014 22:02
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