Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
Bucky Fullminster
Apr 13, 2007

This, as the name would suggest, is a thread for talking about how we power our lives.

It is different from the climate change thread, because while the two often overlap, they are in fact separate issues. About 50% of emissions globally come from power generation, sure, but that means 50% come from elsewhere. And energy generation has ramifications far beyond climate - Cancer from coal mines, oil spills, corruption of water tables, social equity, employment, depletion of natural resources, transport infrastructure, etc.

So here we can evaluate the pros and cons of each technology and look at the developments in this rapidly evolving field as they happen. Most energy generation is based around spinning a turbine, usually through digging stuff up to burn it to heating water to create steam. But as we'll see here, there are many more than one way to spin a turbine.

So without further ado, let’s look at our cast of characters:


Solar Thermal.



There is enough energy contained in a meter squared of sunlight to melt steel. We can capture that quite cheaply and efficiently with mirrors directed towards a central tower, which then heats water to make steam to spin turbines. Energy generated during the day can be stored as molten salt to continue generating energy during the night, or during periods of prolonged cloud cover, presently for over 17 hours.

These are being used in many countries all over the world, particularly in Spain. The best of these are up to 220 MW, and cost between $800 million - $1 billion per tower.

Solar PV.



Good for isolated locations. Portable. No moving parts, so no maintenance. But they do require many rare earth minerals, can be expensive, and aren't as efficient (in terms of watts per square meter) as Solar Thermal.

Wind.



Up there as one the cheapest and most efficient forms of energy. Works best when big and high, to capture as much of the good winds as possible. Some of the best winds are off shore, but these are obviously harder to build and maintain. Onshore placement needs to be carefully considered however, to minimise disruption to local communities.

Geo Thermal.



The Earth has a lot of heat inside it, more than enough to power our energy needs, and we can dig wells to tap that to get our energy. It's pretty expensive to dig for and location dependent though, so it looks like it won't be a major player for a while yet. Best used for heating things like spaces and water. I don't know too much about this one, except that it's used to power almost 30% of Iceland's electricity.

Wave / Tidal.



Technically two different things, but we may as well put them together here. Doesn't get talked about very much, but has pretty significant potential - up to 15,000 TWH of energy worldwide. A big problem is of course maintenance, as well as location dependence. But since a large chunk of the world's population lives near the coast anyway, it's worth investigating. Don't know how the fishes feel about them though.

Hydro.



Currently the biggest source of renewable energy around the world, and like tidal energy, has the advantage of not being intermittent. You can turn it on and turn it off as and when you need, so it works as a good back up. The dams need a lot of concrete though, and when you dam a river, you cause significant disruption to local ecosystems. But most of the sites around the world which are good for hydro have already been dammed anyway.

Landfills.



When we throw our garbage into landfill, it sits there and rots, contributing about 3% to global GHG emissions. We can catch that gas, and either sell it to chemical companies, or burn it to generate electricity. Many waste sites around the world are doing this already, indeed in some areas it's mandatory for landfills over a particular size to do so. They produce enough power for their own on site needs, and usually enough for a few hundred / thousand homes around the area.

Nuclear



Once it's up and running Nuclear power can pack a hell of a punch, and despite a deeply ingrained fear of radioactive disasters, can operate quite safely. The actual production of energy is quite clean, but there is substantial embodied energy in the construction of the plants and the mining of the fuel. There are also issues of social equity to consider, since a lot of the mining and disposal happens on lands which are of special significance to indigenous populations.

edit - courtesy of coffeetable, since nuclear physics are not my forte:


FUSION



Pros: a hundred years from now, it might be the energy source we've always wanted. Cheap, clean, unlimited power.

Cons: the earliest a prototype reactor could come online is DEMO in 2033, the capital costs are ENORMOUS, the current feasible fuel mixes irradiate the lining so there's actually decent amount of waste, it can't be scaled down, and in all likelihood it's always going to be fifty years away.


THORIUM



Pros: like uranium fission! But without the proliferation concerns, because a Th-232 bomb would go off in your hands before it was even half done, and without the scarcity concerns bec- well Jakiri already addressed this.

Cons: it's a massive pain in the rear end. It's a pain to fabricate, it's a pain to control, it's a pain to dispose of. And as the big proliferation concern nowadays is dirty bombs rather than full-blown nukes, it isn't much better than uranium in that respect either.

And office thug had this to add:

Five thousand tonnes of lithium would be enough to power the world for a year via fusion, with everything from synthetic fuel production to electricity. Current world output of lithium is 34000 tonnes per year, and the total easily accessible reserves are around 13 million tonnes. You can also mix lithium usage with deuterium usage at the cost of the reactions only yielding 1 extra neutron instead of 2. Basically, fusion has many options and its fuels are easily accessible.

Coal.





The historical work horse of human energy generation. Generates about half of our power right now, and is responsible for around the same amount of GHGs. Since most of the infrastructure is in place, and we don't factor in the negative externalities, the price for the consumer is pretty cheap. But as the infrastructure ages and needs replacing, and externalities begin to be included, it will seem less and less appealing.

Gas.



Often touted as a ‘transition fuel’, because it burns cleaner than coal, or derided as a distraction, because it just delays further development of renewables. Becoming increasingly hard to find, so we have to resort to less conventional methods of extraction, such as hydrofracking, which involves fracturing underground reservoirs of Coal Seam Gas with chemical cocktails to dislodge and collect the gas.

Tar Sands.



We’re starting to look a bit desperate here. Some have claimed peak oil is a myth because we have heaps more energy locked up in the tar sands. But since it involves substantial amounts of energy to extract and clean, the Return On Energy Investment (ROEI) is pretty small.


So that's a quick introduction. I'd like it to be more detailed, so may well add to it as the thread progresses. If I wait till I have all the info on all of them the thread would never be posted.

What we want:

NUMBERS. Data. What is the output of the thing you’re talking about? How much does it cost to build, and what are the ongoing maintenance and operational costs? How much embodied energy is there? How feasible is it? Where has it been proven? Where is it being proposed? Link videos, articles, pictures, graphs and charts.

We can also include discussion of Energy Efficiency, since it is the quickest, easiest, cheapest, and most effective way of tackling the problem. If it is going to get discussed, I think here is the most appropriate place.

What we don’t want:

Stupid stuff. At this stage, everything is on the table, and we can evaluate them on their merits. So we don't want to hear "renewables don't work hippy, we need to build nuclear right now", unless you have detailed plans of how much those plants cost to build and maintain, where you're going to put them, where you're going to get the fuel from, and where you're going to put the waste. nuclear plan.

To illustrate this, I'll begin with a summary of a plan of how to power Australia with 100% renewables for $37 billion a year for 10 years.

----

Do you know how much electricity Australia uses at present? 228 TWh/year. To be safe, let's assume that over the next 10 years that will increase by 40% to 325 TWh/year - which will be important if we want to really go 100% renewable, by moving away from oil and gas too. That said, we can actually reduce the total amount of energy required, through some decent efficiency standard measures. But we'll stick with that for now.

So we've got a number. 325 TWh per Year. Now let's look at what technology we can combine with our resources, to see if we can meet that renewably.



This is a Solar Thermal plant. On its own, it's rated at 220 MW. Put 13 of them together, and you've got a 3,500 MW (3.5 GW) plant, in an area 15 km x 15 km. Get 12 of those sites scattered around the country, and we're up to 42,500 MW, or 60% of our target, with a total area of 2,760 square km (0.04% of Australia's total landmass). They use molten salt technology to be able to store electricity for up to 17 hours. This is the biggest part of the cost, coming in at $175 billion.



This is an Enercon E126 wind turbine. On its own, it's rated at 7.5 MW. Put 2 or 3 thousand of them together, and you've got between 13 and 22 GW. Get 23 of those sites scattered around the country, and we're up to 40% of our electricity needs. All for a total cost of about $72 billion.

Now we all know the wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine, so these sites need to be selected for their meteorological diversity, like so:



Models have consistently shown that this grid will be able to capture and supply enough energy to power our needs. However, to be on the safe side, we will include back ups too.

Other sources of energy include our existing hydro electric generators, as well as biomass back ups, which can supply an extra 3% - 5% if needed. As well as decentralized rooftop solar PV, of course, which will be important for reducing the demand spikes we pay tens of thousands of dollars per MWh presently. We can get all that done for a cost of between $10 - $20 billion.

Of course if we're going to be serious about this we have to upgrade our transmission lines so we can get the latest High Voltage Direct Current and High Voltage Alternate Current, which would cost about another $92 billion.

So when we add it all up, we get a total cost of $370 billion. The actual roll out of the whole thing is a bit more nuanced of course. We build the first one, then progressively ramp it up, while bringing the cost down through experience. At its peak it can employ up to 140,000 people.

The whole thing has a time frame of 10 years. That's an average of $37 billion a year - or 3% of GDP.

Comparing it to Business as Usual is tricky, because of the huge uncounted externalities of BAU. But on a purely dollar basis it's about $200 billion behind after 10 years, which will quickly close as time goes on and we don't need to keep digging things up and burning them.

So there you have it. That is how you power Australia with 100% renewable energy.

This is all a very simplified version of the Beyond Zero Emissions 'Zero Carbon Australia 2020' plan, which unfortunately I don't have in front of me at the moment, but which you can download from here:

http://beyondzeroemissions.org/zero-carbon-australia-2020

The full report is very detailed, but you can get a good run down in the 17 page synopsis too.

Remember, this isn't hypothetical, these are proven, existing technologies, at work around the world right this very moment. The barriers to implementation are neither technological nor economic.

---

Bucky Fullminster fucked around with this message at 01:04 on Sep 5, 2012

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Kaal
May 22, 2002

through thousands of posts in D&D over a decade, I now believe I know what I'm talking about. if I post forcefully and confidently, I can convince others that is true. no one sees through my facade.
Awesome first post, that's a fascinating and inspirational plan. It's a bit late for me to launch into suggestions of my own, but I did do a little bit of number crunching to see what it would take to use the Australia plan here in the US.

Australia uses 228 TWh/year
USA uses 3,741 TWh/year

Zero Carbon Australia Cost: $370 billion
Zero Carbon USA Cost: $6.14 trillion

:smith:

Bucky Fullminster
Apr 13, 2007

Kaal posted:

Awesome first post, that's a fascinating and inspirational plan. It's a bit late for me to launch into suggestions of my own, but I did do a little bit of number crunching to see what it would take to use the Australia plan here in the US.

Australia uses 228 TWh/year
USA uses 3,741 TWh/year

Zero Carbon Australia Cost: $370 billion
Zero Carbon USA Cost: $6.14 trillion

:smith:

Sure, but what's your GDP? In Australia the plan works out to be about 3% of GDP, or equivalent to how much we spend on gambling, or insurance. (Quick googling shows America's GDP is about $15 trillion - so the yearly cost would be about 5% of GDP. These are all very rounded figures though).

Our current energy use is so wasteful it could quite easily be cut in half. In America I'd suspect the potential for savings are even greater. As I said, this is the quickest and easiest way of tackling the problem.

You have to compare it Business as usual too - how much is the current American fossil fuel industry costing? What will it be in 10 years? What if you factor in the external costs?

Also as the technologies are further developed, prices come right down.

Bip Roberts
Mar 29, 2005
I can't think of any rare earth elements that go into PV production. I wonder if you mean non-earth abundant minerals. Rare earths, like Neodymium, are however incredibly important for wind power generation as those require strong permanent magnets.

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

I think that the first step in the United States is to build a new HVDC grid to replace our old infrastructure, which is pretty lossy (comparably). If we get the political will to do a very basic, essential infrastructure upgrade like that, then I think it will be possible to move away from the status quo of power generation in the US.

Bucky Fullminster
Apr 13, 2007

Dusseldorf posted:

I can't think of any rare earth elements that go into PV production. I wonder if you mean non-earth abundant minerals. Rare earths, like Neodymium, are however incredibly important for wind power generation as those require strong permanent magnets.

I've got Cadmium, Tellurium, Gallium, Arsenic, Indium, Selenium, Silane gas, etc. To be honest though I'm not a geochemist so if they're not rare earth elements then I apologise.

WarpedNaba
Feb 8, 2012

Being social makes me swell!
On the Nuclear point - Have you heard of or done much research into the Thorium Liquid Fluoride Salt reactors? It's pretty loving amazing stuff, and Australia has the largest reserves of Monazite (The primary ore you extract Thorium from) in the world.

WarpedNaba fucked around with this message at 08:38 on Sep 4, 2012

Bucky Fullminster
Apr 13, 2007

Kaal posted:

Awesome first post, that's a fascinating and inspirational plan. It's a bit late for me to launch into suggestions of my own, but I did do a little bit of number crunching to see what it would take to use the Australia plan here in the US.

Australia uses 228 TWh/year
USA uses 3,741 TWh/year

Zero Carbon Australia Cost: $370 billion
Zero Carbon USA Cost: $6.14 trillion

:smith:

Also quickly, 228 TWh is current consumption, but the ZCA plan produces 325 TWh/year. So the American cost is (theoretically) down to $4.3 trillion, or $425 billion per year.

But also, that plan is specifically for Australia, so we'd need to do a proper analyis of America's needs to compare them properly.

Bucky Fullminster
Apr 13, 2007

WarpedNaba posted:

On the Nuclear point - Have you heard of or done much research into the Thorium Liquid Fluoride Salt reactors? It's pretty loving amazing stuff, and Australia has the largest reserves of Monazite (The primary ore you extract Thorium from) in the world.

I've heard of it, yes, an one of the reasons I started the thread was to learn more about these sorts of things. Preferably with prices.

Bip Roberts
Mar 29, 2005

Hobo Erotica posted:

I've got Cadmium, Tellurium, Gallium, Arsenic, Indium, Selenium, Silane gas, etc. To be honest though I'm not a geochemist so if they're not rare earth elements then I apologise.

None of those are rare earth elements. There is a lot of work into producing PV cells that don't require non-earth abundant and less toxic materials like those you listed above and in fact the most common solar cells available today, poly-crystaline silicon cells use none of them.

Turks
Nov 16, 2006

Thorium reactors are a promising technology but since they aren't ready for commercial deployment yet an accurate analysis of cost can't be made. The outline for an Australia using only renewables was done with existing technologies in mind but even then true cost can't be known without actually trying it.

Zodium
Jun 19, 2004

Great initiative, and I really like how pragmatic the approach is. This is the kind of complex perspective I personally hope energy policy will take. I think it's counterproductive that the current energy debate takes the form of a race to the top, where the argument keeps going in circles around which form of energy is the magic bullet that will save us, rather than looking at what each kind of energy generation is good for where in what amounts. As an aside, I think the OP could stand to include fusion and thorium energy for consideration, even if it's currently quite a while away, but that's assuming we will continue assuming the current state of technology and not speculate about future progress.

The OP did a great job informally covering this by example, but I'd just like to make explicit the factors that I think we ought to be covering:

  • Landmass cost (total and proportional)
  • Personnel (jobs count, training)
  • Initial cost (per capita and as a percentage of GDP)
  • Energy efficiency (percentage, ROEI)
  • GHG emissions (total and proportional)
  • Stability (hours/day)

To "power our lives" efficiently and sustainably, we need to know the approximate values for these under the current system, and we ought to enumerate the desirable distributions of energy generation, on a per-country basis. The OP is one such distribution for Australia, but I'm sure there are more distributions that could sustainably power Australia. We also need to know how the factors interact - in the OP's case, stability and landmass interact to create a need for particular geographical distributions of energy generation, meaning we can't just place them willy-nilly. Other countries may face personnel or cash shortages, may be small enough that the country is meteorologically homogeneous, or may already have below average emissions or other special needs.

I'm going to take a crack at Denmark.

Rand alPaul
Feb 3, 2010

by Nyc_Tattoo
This pro-Thorium website of dubious credibility says a 1 GW Thorium plant would cost $250m to construct.

WarpedNaba
Feb 8, 2012

Being social makes me swell!

Hobo Erotica posted:

I've heard of it, yes, an one of the reasons I started the thread was to learn more about these sorts of things. Preferably with prices.

Hooooo boy, have I got figures for you.

First up: Here are the obligatory threads.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf62.html

http://www.the-weinberg-foundation.org/index.php

http://www.thorium.tv/en/thorium_reactor/thorium_reactor_1.php/

http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2006/10/a-nuclear-reactor-in-every-home/

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor

Hope you've got a couple of hours.

Turks posted:

Thorium reactors are a promising technology but since they aren't ready for commercial deployment yet an accurate analysis of cost can't be made. The outline for an Australia using only renewables was done with existing technologies in mind but even then true cost can't be known without actually trying it.

I understand that the only major issue is due to mass production and chemical extraction of certain byproducts of the fuel cycle. Thorium reactors have had valid models produced and run for six years as prototypes in the US.

Admittedly, those models were back in the fifties and a fair amount of the research has been mothballed, but the concept is feasible, working models have been produced and the possible gains are monumental.

Rand alPaul posted:

This pro-Thorium website of dubious credibility says a 1 GW Thorium plant would cost $250m to construct.

That was considering the elimination of safety precautions and an economy of scale.

quote:

In fact, you might be able to go as low as $220 million or below, if 80% of reactor costs truly are attributable to expensive anti-meltdown measures.


This is not a statement, it is merely speculation, one of the things that research into Thorium energy should be able to give more concrete figures on.

WarpedNaba fucked around with this message at 08:58 on Sep 4, 2012

Bucky Fullminster
Apr 13, 2007

Dusseldorf posted:

None of those are rare earth elements. There is a lot of work into producing PV cells that don't require non-earth abundant and less toxic materials like those you listed above and in fact the most common solar cells available today, poly-crystaline silicon cells use none of them.

Right, thanks, and sorry, if you feel like writing a more accurate run down I'd be happy to include it in the OP.


Zodium posted:

Great initiative, and I really like how pragmatic the approach is. This is the kind of complex perspective I personally hope energy policy will take. I think it's counterproductive that the current energy debate takes the form of a race to the top, where the argument keeps going in circles around which form of energy is the magic bullet that will save us, rather than looking at what each kind of energy generation is good for where in what amounts. As an aside, I think the OP could stand to include fusion and thorium energy for consideration, even if it's currently quite a while away, but that's assuming we will continue assuming the current state of technology and not speculate about future progress.

The OP did a great job informally covering this by example, but I'd just like to make explicit the factors that I think we ought to be covering:

  • Landmass cost (total and proportional)
  • Personnel (jobs count, training)
  • Initial cost (per capita and as a percentage of GDP)
  • Energy efficiency (percentage, ROEI)
  • GHG emissions (total and proportional)
  • Stability (hours/day)

To "power our lives" efficiently and sustainably, we need to know the approximate values for these under the current system, and we ought to enumerate the desirable distributions of energy generation, on a per-country basis. The OP is one such distribution for Australia, but I'm sure there are more distributions that could sustainably power Australia. We also need to know how the factors interact - in the OP's case, stability and landmass interact to create a need for particular geographical distributions of energy generation, meaning we can't just place them willy-nilly. Other countries may face personnel or cash shortages, may be small enough that the country is meteorologically homogeneous, or may already have below average emissions or other special needs.

I'm going to take a crack at Denmark.

Excellent! Looking forward to it. Denmark already have a lot of wind power, and are going for a very ambitious target that may be something like 100% renewable energy by 2050. Although I could be confusing them with Germany. (I'd like to avoid being this vague in the future, sorry).


Also if anyone wants to do a Thorium run down I can include that in the OP too.

rudatron
May 31, 2011

by Fluffdaddy
Australia uses 1463TWh of total energy, not 228, because you have to compensate for the oil used in transportation (among other things), so even this scheme would not lead to a zero carbon emission australia. According to the world bank anyway:
http://www.google.com.au/publicdata...dl=en&ind=false
That's in kilotons of oil equivalent, and each toe (tonne of oil equivalent) is about 12000kWh.

rudatron fucked around with this message at 09:18 on Sep 4, 2012

Bucky Fullminster
Apr 13, 2007

rudatron posted:

Australia uses 1463TWh of total energy, not 228, because you have to compensate for the oil used in transportation (among other things). According to the world bank anyway:
http://www.google.com.au/publicdata...dl=en&ind=false
That's in kilotons of oil equivalent, and each toe is about 12000kWh.

That would mean your scheme has to use about 15% of Australia's GDP, just to cover for its energy usage.

The plan is talking about stationary energy.

Incidentally, the plan actually also details a strategy for replacing our cars with electric vehicles, and includes the energy in its figures. If hooked up to a smart grid, their batteries can be used as storage for surplus energy too, to smooth out demand peaks. But I'll have to go over it again when I get home for more details.

Office Thug
Jan 17, 2008

Luke Cage just shut you down!

Rand alPaul posted:

This pro-Thorium website of dubious credibility says a 1 GW Thorium plant would cost $250m to construct.

There's a few slightly more robust calculations out there. Kirk pulled some numbers together on his blog for small modular systems: http://energyfromthorium.com/2010/07/11/ending-energy-poverty/

Here's what he had to say about its fuel economy: http://energyfromthorium.com/cubic-meter/

While Charles Barton estimates the LFTR could cost as little as 1.25 billion per 1 GWe overnight costs: http://energyfromthorium.com/2009/05/17/scaling-the-lftr-large-scale-production-and-cost/

There are other studies out there, including some very early studies by the ORNL team as well as a few recent ones by economists. To be frank, I'd be dubious about anything below 2 billion per GWe for any sort of nuclear system. The lion's share of costs to building a new plant today comes almost exclusively from regulatory hurdles and delays: http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter9.html

quote:

The increase in total construction time, indicated in Fig. 2, from 7 years in 1971 to 12 years in 1980 roughly doubled the final cost of plants. In addition, the EEDB (cost of building a nuclear power plant at the current price of labor and materials), corrected for inflation, approximately doubled during that time period. Thus, regulatory ratcheting, quite aside from the effects of inflation, quadrupled the cost of a nuclear power plant.

Spazzle
Jul 5, 2003

The calculations in the op are really bad and the costs are likely to be many times higher. You cant just overcome intermitancy by splitting your generators into different sites, you also have to overbuild and invest in storage. You also need a system that will work all the time, every year regardless of weather.

Lawman 0
Aug 17, 2010

So is this thread gonna be our D&D energy Thunderdome? :haw:
Also where is the section about Space based Solar in the OP? :colbert:
I know Japan and the U.S DOD is looking into using it in the near future.

Kaal
May 22, 2002

through thousands of posts in D&D over a decade, I now believe I know what I'm talking about. if I post forcefully and confidently, I can convince others that is true. no one sees through my facade.

Spazzle posted:

The calculations in the op are really bad and the costs are likely to be many times higher. You cant just overcome intermitancy by splitting your generators into different sites, you also have to overbuild and invest in storage. You also need a system that will work all the time, every year regardless of weather.

The premise of the thread is to be as numbers heavy as possible. Even though these criticisms are valid in principle, I think that they should be backed up with hard data or rescinded as a matter of course.

MrL_JaKiri
Sep 23, 2003

A bracing glass of carrot juice!
Most of the environmental impact of nuclear power is from mining. Mining is also very dangerous work.

Fortunately, uranium can be acquired from sea water at essentially unlimited amounts! It costs, with current tech, about twice as much as mined uranium so of course people don't do it (even though it's better for the environment and human life...) but there's no theoretical reason why it can't take place and uranium fuel is an essentially trivial cost when running a reactor.

There's also the odd breakthrough that may make it cheaper - eg http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19335708

Turks
Nov 16, 2006

Lawman 0 posted:

So is this thread gonna be our D&D energy Thunderdome? :haw:
Also where is the section about Space based Solar in the OP? :colbert:
I know Japan and the U.S DOD is looking into using it in the near future.

I really can't see how space based solar makes any sense given the astronomical (:v:) cost of launching anything into space. Consider how many tons of mirrors a solar thermal plant rated at 200MW needs, and even if you magically quadrupled that figure by putting it in space you'd probably still be better off putting it on the ground. Same goes for PV.

coffeetable
Feb 5, 2006

TELL ME AGAIN HOW GREAT BRITAIN WOULD BE IF IT WAS RULED BY THE MERCILESS JACKBOOT OF PRINCE CHARLES

YES I DO TALK TO PLANTS ACTUALLY

Hobo Erotica posted:

There is enough energy contained in a meter squared of sunlight to melt steel.

*twitch* This is not a sentence that makes sense.

That aside,

FUSION



Pros: a hundred years from now, it might be the energy source we've always wanted. Cheap, clean, unlimited power.

Cons: the earliest a prototype reactor could come online is DEMO in 2033, the capital costs are ENORMOUS, the current feasible fuel mixes irradiate the lining so there's actually decent amount of waste, it can't be scaled down, and in all likelihood it's always going to be fifty years away.


THORIUM



Pros: like uranium fission! But without the proliferation concerns, because a Th-232 bomb would go off in your hands before it was even half done, and without the scarcity concerns bec- well Jakiri already addressed this.

Cons: it's a massive pain in the rear end. It's a pain to fabricate, it's a pain to control, it's a pain to dispose of. And as the big proliferation concern nowadays is dirty bombs rather than full-blown nukes, it isn't much better than uranium in that respect either.

-

What I'm saying is that there are no magic bullets. Any time you see a miracle-energy story on Reddit or in New Scientist, you should be incredibly skeptical. The best solution by far is traditional fission base-load with as much geographically appropriate solar/wind/tidal as the grid can take. Unfortunately private nuclear power is a recipe for disaster, and modern political thinking does not allow for a repetition of France's incredible success with EdF.

coffeetable fucked around with this message at 15:42 on Sep 4, 2012

Lawman 0
Aug 17, 2010

Turks posted:

I really can't see how space based solar makes any sense given the astronomical (:v:) cost of launching anything into space. Consider how many tons of mirrors a solar thermal plant rated at 200MW needs, and even if you magically quadrupled that figure by putting it in space you'd probably still be better off putting it on the ground. Same goes for PV.

Launch prices should start going down as more competition starts to sprout up in both private (spacex vs ULA vs Virgin Galatic) and public (Russia vs Chinese vs ESA) agencies.

Nintendo Kid
Aug 4, 2011

by Smythe

Lawman 0 posted:

Launch prices should start going down as more competition starts to sprout up in both private (spacex vs ULA vs Virgin Galatic) and public (Russia vs Chinese vs ESA) agencies.

They'll theoretically go down, but there's a pretty drat huge gap between just going down, and actually being cheap enough.

Turks
Nov 16, 2006

There's also the matter of how much energy it takes to launch things into space. How long would a space based solar array have to work just to pay off the energy debt of launching it?

Lawman 0
Aug 17, 2010

Turks posted:

There's also the matter of how much energy it takes to launch things into space. How long would a space based solar array have to work just to pay off the energy debt of launching it?

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/03/space-based-solar-power/

quote:

If I take my ultra-lightweight panel producing 1 kW/kg, I must launch 100 kg of rocket, at a cost of 5 GJ. A 1 kW panel will deliver 0.5 kW to the end-user, after transmission/conversion losses are considered. The 5 GJ launch price tag is then paid off in 107 seconds, or about one third of a year. Add the embodied energy of the other components in space and on the ground, and I could easily believe we get to a year payback—now bringing the total (manufacture plus launch) to two years and an EROEI around 10:1. If my 100× light-weighting proves to be unrealistic, and we can only realize a factor of ten improvement over our rooftop panels, the solar panel launch cost climbs to three years, so that adding other components results in perhaps a 4:1 EROEI.

This is also a very conservative estimate.
Even if its not *that* great it would still be worthy of subsidy since the promotion of space development and resources would be well worth its cost.

Edit:
Let me just say that I have a vested interest in Space Development since I see as the only real way Mankind will be able to begin the long process of restoring the biosphere once the rest of the world *hopefully* finishes the process of transition to low fertility around 2050 and human population begins topping out at around 9-10 billion.
The Challenge of our generation is to figure out how to prevent our civilization from crashing due to environmental stresses so that we can arrive at the population peak and begin the long process of undoing the damage to the Earth.
Expanding to Space will give the biosphere breathing room to adapt to the human dominated world we have created.

Lawman 0 fucked around with this message at 16:37 on Sep 4, 2012

Turks
Nov 16, 2006

Even if I concede the point that the EROEI is not as bad as my intuition told me, that link goes on to describe how it would be much more expensive and not save that much land area compared to ground based solar.

it's outside the scope of this thread but I also don't actually believe that space exploration can save us from ourselves. The only long term solution I know of is to lower our population to a more sustainable level, which apparently affluent and well educated societies do by themselves. Populations always expand until limited by resources, so getting more resources in space won't help so much as subverting this trend through cultural means.

Lawman 0
Aug 17, 2010

Turks posted:

Even if I concede the point that the EROEI is not as bad as my intuition told me, that link goes on to describe how it would be much more expensive and not save that much land area compared to ground based solar.

it's outside the scope of this thread but I also don't actually believe that space exploration can save us from ourselves. The only long term solution I know of is to lower our population to a more sustainable level, which apparently affluent and well educated societies do by themselves. Populations always expand until limited by resources, so getting more resources in space won't help so much as subverting this trend through cultural means.

:ssh: That's the point im trying to make my friend, but in order to make sure that all societies will eventually be able to make the Demographic transition and stay there mankind must gain breathing room to grow for some time while gaining practical knowledge of how to live in an efficient way.
Living and exploring in space would give people excellent insight into how to use limited resources in an efficient manner, since failure would mean death in space.

Evil_Greven
Feb 20, 2007

Whadda I got to,
whadda I got to do
to wake ya up?

To shake ya up,
to break the structure up!?
When you talk about energy generation, perhaps a branch of the discussion might be to incorporate what that energy is being used for - and if there are alternatives to how we are using energy now.

Consider weatherization of homes, for example. I'm somewhat familiar with this, and it's one of the most cost-effective things you, personally, can do. More efficient construction methods would reduce the need for air conditioning (thus electric) and heating (various).

A supplement to this tangent is solar thermal heating. There are, for example, youtube DIY videos (and commercial versions) of solar thermal panels for the purpose of heating homes and businesses, and they are rather effective. I believe there is also underground air conditioning, but I'm less familiar with that. Would this be an acceptable side discussion for this thread?

Delta-Wye
Sep 29, 2005
There are a few issues missed in the OP. One is energy distribution - both the US and Australia have issues with population densities. It's easy to provide services for 90% of the population who are relatively clustered, but what about the other 10% spread across 90% of the country? Ironically, the ultra-rural parts of the US I'm familiar with have been moving towards renewable energy because the high cost of oil has made the payoff for renewable energy sources like wind turbines much quicker. I'm not sure if it's the same for remote parts of Australia.

FYI - I really liked pumped hydro as a solution to irregular energy output from renewable sources like solar and wind. http://www.fhc.co.uk/dinorwig.htm "Self-filling" hydro is a an ingenious solution to the problem of cloudy and windless days.

Office Thug
Jan 17, 2008

Luke Cage just shut you down!

coffeetable posted:

FUSION

Pros: a hundred years from now, it might be the energy source we've always wanted. Cheap, clean, unlimited power.

Cons: the earliest a prototype reactor could come online is DEMO in 2033, the capital costs are ENORMOUS, the current feasible fuel mixes irradiate the lining so there's actually decent amount of waste, it can't be scaled down, and in all likelihood it's always going to be fifty years away.

Most don't seem to comprehend what fusion is and what it will do once we figure out how to make it work. Fusion is dreamed about by most because of its incredible energy specificity (6 times that of fission), which is what would make it cheap and clean. Theoretically you would need "far less" of it to produce the same energy you would using anything else. But that's not actually the kicker for fusion.

What it's really good at is producing excess neutrons. Some fusion pathways can produce up to 2 extra neutrons per reaction, which can lead to breeding ratios above 2.5. To give you a bit of contrast, plutonium breeding only ever got up to a ratio of 1.2.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_reaction
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium_economy

This neutronicity is quite litterally the best and worst thing about nuclear fusion, and nuclear in general. On the bright side, you have the ability to create a massive surplus of nuclear fuel from extremely common fertile isotopes: Lithium-7 (over 90% of natural lithium) can be used to make tritium with no net neutron loss, two tritium can be fused to produce 2 neutrons and a lot of energy, said 2 neutrons can go on to transmute 2 thorium-232 (common as lead) or uranium-238 (99.3% of all natural uranium) into uranium-233 and plutonium-239, respectively. And those 2 fissile fuels also have positive neutronicities when used in their own breeder reactors. The only cost to all this would be reserved in actually building the reactors to use the fuels. Transmuting heavier isotopes is itself beneficial because it leads to medical, industrial, and power-relevant isotopes that you simply can't acquire in any other way.

On the downside, that fissile material you made can also be used in bombs. You can incorporate safeties against this in your system (dirtying up your isotopes by irradiating them for too long for example), but any state with decent knowledge and a retrofitted fusion reactor could make weapons-grade stuff fairly easily. Ironically, the most successful fusion reactors have also been the ones that use fission-fusion thermonuclear bombs to produce heat/neutrons in controlled environments, like PACER.

coffeetable posted:

THORIUM

Pros: like uranium fission! But without the proliferation concerns, because a Th-232 bomb would go off in your hands before it was even half done, and without the scarcity concerns bec- well Jakiri already addressed this.

Cons: it's a massive pain in the rear end. It's a pain to fabricate, it's a pain to control, it's a pain to dispose of. And as the big proliferation concern nowadays is dirty bombs rather than full-blown nukes, it isn't much better than uranium in that respect either.

There's a lot of wrong here. Thorium doesn't fission, and it's completely different from uranium in terms of what's required to use it effectively. It is most effective in liquid-fueled systems, in which there are no fabrication costs and no handling concerns. Waste also becomes a limited issue, since breeders can transmute and destroy all transuranics and most fission products with enough excess neutron radiation. As for dirty bombs, that's largely a media scare thing. Most rogue states have ready-access to chemical warfare agents which are far more destructive than fallout in every sense.

In thermonuclear weapons, we are most concerned with Uranium-233 (the actual fuel of the thorium cycle), which is itself not very good in bombs because it doesn't fission very well under fast-neutron conditions (Operation Teapot tried it out with limited success). However it lacks any serious "neutron poisons" which typically cripple isotopes like Plutonium and impure U-235 in bombs, which makes it really easy to use and set off. The problem is that U-233 comes with a bitch of an isotope, U-232. This guy is part of an off-branch of the Neptunium series decay chain which ends off with Thallium-208 decaying to Lead and releasing a gently caress-off huge amount of gamma radiation (2.6 MeV, which is like half of what you get from a typical fission reaction) easily enough to maim anyone in the vicinity and fry electronics. The radiation signature is powerful enough to be detected from orbital space.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_cycle#Uranium-232_contamination

There are ways to produce U-233 without any U-232, but it's very difficult and requires special (obviously illegal) systems or practices in all cases. You would definitely not be able to do it economically with a solid-fueled reactor, since you need very fast and frequent reprocessing of any bred intermittent fuel. In liquid-fueled systems, depending on what configuration you go with, you'll either not be able to legally use the reprocessing method needed for potential production of pure U-233, or you will simply not be able to keep the reactor online if you decided to divert material to make a bomb.

Office Thug fucked around with this message at 22:00 on Sep 4, 2012

Bucky Fullminster
Apr 13, 2007

Spazzle posted:

The calculations in the op are really bad

Which calculations?

quote:

and the costs are likely to be many times higher.

You heard it here first folks, the actual cost of a 10 year, $370 bn project to completely overhaul a national energy system, could in fact be higher than the first practical plan that anyone has ever actually done. We need NUMBERS spazzle, it's right there in the OP. Which part of the plan would be more expensive?

quote:

You cant just overcome intermitancy by splitting your generators into different sites

In the plan, they have modeled the amount of solar radiation recieved at each site, as well as the average wind speeds, and factored it all in. Download the report and see for yourself, it's got heaps of graphs and charts and tables and everything.

quote:

you also have to overbuild and invest in storage. You also need a system that will work all the time, every year regardless of weather.

This is in fact exactly what they have done.

In the future people let's avoid posts like these. Don't criticize something without reading it, and don't do it without numbers.


Lawman 0 posted:

So is this thread gonna be our D&D energy Thunderdome? :haw:
Also where is the section about Space based Solar in the OP? :colbert:
I know Japan and the U.S DOD is looking into using it in the near future.

Yeah :dance:
I love the ambition of space based solar, there's certainly a lot of potential there, and that's a great link you posted, but it's too far off to be considered viable at this stage. Still, if you want to write a quick run down, I can include it in the OP.

coffeetable posted:

*twitch* This is not a sentence that makes sense.

Sorry, was it the wording or the science that didn't make sense? This is what I meant:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtzRAjW6KO0
http://youtu.be/TtzRAjW6KO0

quote:

That aside,

FUSION

Cheers, I'll chuck this in the OP, unless office Thug has some objections or wants to clean it up. I'll be honest, I do love all science, but my eyes glaze over with chemistry, particularly nuclear physics. So I'm not as good with that as I should be.


Evil_Greven posted:

When you talk about energy generation, perhaps a branch of the discussion might be to incorporate what that energy is being used for - and if there are alternatives to how we are using energy now.

Consider weatherization of homes, for example. I'm somewhat familiar with this, and it's one of the most cost-effective things you, personally, can do. More efficient construction methods would reduce the need for air conditioning (thus electric) and heating (various).

A supplement to this tangent is solar thermal heating. There are, for example, youtube DIY videos (and commercial versions) of solar thermal panels for the purpose of heating homes and businesses, and they are rather effective. I believe there is also underground air conditioning, but I'm less familiar with that. Would this be an acceptable side discussion for this thread?

I do mention Efficiency in the 'what we DO want' section of the OP, but not in any detail. But yes, that is definitely acceptable in this thread. Passive solar orientation rules, so simple yet so effective. I just spent the weekend in a cabin at the snow that was warm as gently caress cos it was done like that.


Delta-Wye posted:

There are a few issues missed in the OP. One is energy distribution - both the US and Australia have issues with population densities. It's easy to provide services for 90% of the population who are relatively clustered, but what about the other 10% spread across 90% of the country? Ironically, the ultra-rural parts of the US I'm familiar with have been moving towards renewable energy because the high cost of oil has made the payoff for renewable energy sources like wind turbines much quicker. I'm not sure if it's the same for remote parts of Australia.

FYI - I really liked pumped hydro as a solution to irregular energy output from renewable sources like solar and wind. http://www.fhc.co.uk/dinorwig.htm "Self-filling" hydro is a an ingenious solution to the problem of cloudy and windless days.

Two ways to approach this. One is with upgraded transmission lines, and the other is with decentralized power. I don't like cables so I prefer the second. There are more Solar Thermal technologies than the just Central Tower thing too, such as the dish, which may be more suitable for smaller scale. And we're seeing a simmilar take up of renewables in regional/rural Australia too.

And yeah, pumped hydro will almost certainly play a role in energy storage, and I'm pretty sure that's included in the BZE plan I linked.

Bucky Fullminster fucked around with this message at 00:11 on Sep 5, 2012

Office Thug
Jan 17, 2008

Luke Cage just shut you down!

Hobo Erotica posted:

Cheers, I'll chuck this in the OP, unless office Thug has some objections or wants to clean it up. I'll be honest, I do love all science, but my eyes glaze over with chemistry, particularly nuclear physics. So I'm not as good with that as I should be.

The bit on fusion is great. You might want to add that five thousand tonnes of lithium would be enough to power the world for a year via fusion, with everything from synthetic fuel production to electricity. Current world output of lithium is 34000 tonnes per year, and the total easily accessible reserves are around 13 million tonnes. You can also mix lithium usage with deuterium usage at the cost of the reactions only yielding 1 extra neutron instead of 2. Basically, fusion has many options and its fuels are easily accessible.

coffeetable
Feb 5, 2006

TELL ME AGAIN HOW GREAT BRITAIN WOULD BE IF IT WAS RULED BY THE MERCILESS JACKBOOT OF PRINCE CHARLES

YES I DO TALK TO PLANTS ACTUALLY

Hobo Erotica posted:

Cheers, I'll chuck this in the OP, unless office Thug has some objections or wants to clean it up.

Go with whatever Thug says. I know considerable (considerably) less about thorium than I do fusion, and mainly just wanted to knock it down a bit because People On The Internet tend to be such big fans.

Sorry for being so willfully misinformed Thug, and thank you for calling me out on it. Will endeavour be better educated next time :)

e: As to the sentence I was twitching about Hobo, the problem is that you're comparing power density to temperature. There's enough power in a square centimeter of sunlight to melt steel should it be sufficiently concentrated. A better comparison would be that 1m^2 of sunlight could boil a cup of coffee in 90 seconds.

(roughly)

coffeetable fucked around with this message at 01:06 on Sep 5, 2012

Bucky Fullminster
Apr 13, 2007

coffeetable posted:

Go with whatever Thug says. I know considerable (considerably) less about thorium than I do fusion, and mainly just wanted to knock it down a bit because People On The Internet tend to be such big fans.

Sorry for being so willfully misinformed Thug, and thank you for calling me out on it. Will endeavour be better educated next time :)

e: As to the sentence I was twitching about, the problem is that you're comparing power density to temperature. There's enough power in a square centimeter of sunlight to melt steel should it be sufficiently concentrated. A better comparison would be that 1m^2 of sunlight could boil a cup of coffee in 90 seconds.

(roughly)

Added to the OP. I got confused and may have done the wrong thing with Thorium though, office thug, if you want to do a bit on it which a layman would understand I'll put that in instead.

AS for the energy per m^2, I appreciate the clarification, but I feel it's semantics. I like the example I use, because it's easy for people to understand. It's the heat we want in Solar Thermal, that's where the energy for our electricity comes from, and the point is that there's a lot more in a small area than we might think from our sunbathing experience. And I think 'melt steel' is a more powerful illustration than 'boil coffee'. I do accept this could be lazy science writing though, and am curious to hear more.

I mean if energy is 'the potential to do work', then I think the way I describe it is basically right. There is enough in that amount of sunlight to do that amount of work. Ideally I link it to the video I posted (or a more professional one with James May for example, but I like the first one because it's just a guy in the backyard).

T-1000
Mar 28, 2010

Hobo Erotica posted:

AS for the energy per m^2, I appreciate the clarification, but I feel it's semantics. I like the example I use, because it's easy for people to understand. It's the heat we want in Solar Thermal, that's where the energy for our electricity comes from, and the point is that there's a lot more in a small area than we might think from our sunbathing experience. And I think 'melt steel' is a more powerful illustration than 'boil coffee'. I do accept this could be lazy science writing though, and am curious to hear more.

I mean if energy is 'the potential to do work', then I think the way I describe it is basically right. There is enough in that amount of sunlight to do that amount of work. Ideally I link it to the video I posted (or a more professional one with James May for example, but I like the first one because it's just a guy in the backyard).
The problem is it doesn't describe the amount of work. How big a piece of steel? How focused does the sunlight need to be? There's a big difference between melting a giant steel girder with a cheap mirror, and melting a milligram of steel foil with a large, very precise set of optics. Both would describe melting steel, but they are quantitatively completely different and equating them is sloppy. You can say that coffee takes approximately 4.18 joules per gram-Kelvin to heat up, but "melting steel" is vague and hard to quantify.

Aureon
Jul 11, 2012

by Y Kant Ozma Post
(Working on an effortpost on current-age nuclear reactors, rounding up sources)

To be honest, that plan looks like half wishful thinking, half political fabrication.
But i may be wrong.
The first number itself (1b for 220MW of solar) looks extremely optimistic, since the biggest solar plant built to date is 50mw; and 42'500 MW running for a year at "proven" (2400 h/y) would produce 102TWh, far off the 60% of the 340TWh missing from the equation. The plant would have to run for a median of 4800 h/y, double the PS20 rate, to actually do that.
I haven't yet read the whole paper, but you should at least correct that "60% of target" in the OP, since it's wildly off figure.

I'll withhold further comments until i've read the whole paper.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Spazzle
Jul 5, 2003

Hobo Erotica posted:

Which calculations?


You heard it here first folks, the actual cost of a 10 year, $370 bn project to completely overhaul a national energy system, could in fact be higher than the first practical plan that anyone has ever actually done. We need NUMBERS spazzle, it's right there in the OP. Which part of the plan would be more expensive?


In the plan, they have modeled the amount of solar radiation recieved at each site, as well as the average wind speeds, and factored it all in. Download the report and see for yourself, it's got heaps of graphs and charts and tables and everything.

The PDF acknowledges some of the limitations (though in a pretty backhanded manner). You can't just use average values of solar radiation and wind speed, especially when you have limited amounts of storage, nor can you pretend that country wide weather is always uncorrelated. If you have a couple of days where the weather deviates significantly from the average value your backup capacity will be unable to keep up. The entire country will lose power and transportation (if you are going to an electric transport model). You need to significantly overbuild your infrastructure to compensate. Its like farming, most years a country can count on rain falling in a typical pattern on most farms, but you also need to plan on drought years when everything drops out all at once.

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply