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RichieWolk
Jun 4, 2004

FUCK UNIONS

UNIONS R4 DRUNKS

FUCK YOU
I want there to be floating solar panels, that we can just carpet the oceans with. A 6,000 square mile photovoltaic solar panel grid covering 0.01% the pacific ocean would be able to supply power to like, the entire world.

...

What do you mean "financially infeasable"?! :mad:

e: lagged and doubleposted wtf

RichieWolk fucked around with this message at 03:45 on Sep 5, 2012

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Turks
Nov 16, 2006

^^^^

I'm not sure exactly how to parse your post here, but if you wanted 6000 square miles of PVs surely it would be more cost effective and easy from an engineering standpoint to just cover buildings with them?

Winks
Feb 16, 2009

Alright, who let Rube Goldberg in here?

Turks posted:

^^^^

I'm not sure exactly how to parse your post here, but if you wanted 6000 square miles of PVs surely it would be more cost effective and easy from an engineering standpoint to just cover buildings with them?

Without considering the actual power generation, a centralized location would be easier and more cost effective. The maintenance problems are easily located, diagnosed, and fixed along with everything related to that being built on site. Not only would maint be harder, but every building you installed it on would have to have equipment to let power both flow in when it needs more and out when it's generating excess. We would also have to overhaul the grid because I don't think it could survive a wide scale implementation of that on that order of magnitude.

jigokuman
Aug 28, 2002


Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is the 45th and current President of the United States. Before entering politics, he was a businessman and television personality.
Isn't lifespan another major issue with solar panels? The numbers I have seen indicate around 30 years of service, which is good, but not quite enough to say, put on your roof when you first purchase a home and then forget about electricity bills for the rest of your life, which is what I, at least, imagined when I looked into them.

Winks
Feb 16, 2009

Alright, who let Rube Goldberg in here?

jigokuman posted:

Isn't lifespan another major issue with solar panels? The numbers I have seen indicate around 30 years of service, which is good, but not quite enough to say, put on your roof when you first purchase a home and then forget about electricity bills for the rest of your life, which is what I, at least, imagined when I looked into them.

The average solar panel has a lifespan of 20-30 years. However as they age their voltage drops and the voltage loss accelerates as the panel ages. It's all dependant on the specifics of the solar panel though (type/location/manufacturing/etc)

GulMadred
Oct 20, 2005

I don't understand how you can be so mistaken.

Spazzle posted:

You can't just use average values of solar radiation
They didn't. The report used 2 years worth of geographic insolation data, evaluated based on the location and size of the hypothetical CST facilities and the efficiency of the chosen technology, averaged into 30-minute chunks for convenience, and compared to historical electricity demand for those two years (with a +40% multiplier since they also want to convert a bunch of industries and residential services away from oil/gas/coal).

quote:

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.
This was covered in the report (around page 80). The grid model actually did encounter several periods where there were significant, simultaneous, and prolonged (multi-day) shortages of both wind and solar power across several regions, which would have produced brownouts. However, the system was designed to cover this contingency - the hypothetical biomass furnaces were fired up, the existing hydro turbines were spun up, and the imaginary system managed to satisfy demand.

quote:

You need to significantly overbuild your infrastructure to compensate.
This is included in the report; the system frequently produces a >100% surplus (w/r/t the +40% electrical demand already baked into the assumptions). Presumably this surplus would be consumed by a growing fleet of electric cars, or perhaps opportunistic industrial applications (some sort of time-share aluminum smelters? desalination?).

A few caveats:
  • the study period is limited to two years; a larger scope would certainly reveal larger fluctuations (and thus a need for greater overcapacity in the design). If we're going to demand that nuclear plants be built to withstand thousand-year events, then we shouldn't allow renewable projects to skate by on short-range analysis.
  • their wind modeling is deficient, since they haven't used site-specific historical data (e.g. anemometer readings). Instead they've taken the total observed output of actual wind farms during the study period and then scaled it up to produce minute-by-minute values which reflect the greater capacity of the proposed system, but they haven't properly accounted for regional variation.
  • I lack the expertise to judge their plans w/r/t transmission lines. Perhaps the grid analysis is flawed in that it freely "shares" regional surpluses to cover coincident regional shortfalls, without fairly accounting for transmission losses (and/or hard limits on regional interlink capacity).
    • Arguably, the deleterious effects of regional shortages could be mitigated by dynamic pricing and demand shaping. If you can get a nation to sign onto a project like this, then presumably there will be some public willingness to make occasional lifestyle adjustments.
  • I can't find much actual detail on the proposed biomass logistics. E.g. how much material would be stored at each site, how long could each site continue operating in the event of a prolonged reduction in insolation (e.g. Tambora event), how quickly could the on-site stockpiles be replenished after a prolonged burning interval, how would they choose the proportion of agri waste to be pelletised each year (vs how much to be retained as green fertilizer), etc

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

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.

On the other hand, you would also need a lot less energy storage since you can have uninterrupted solar power if you beam the energy down in the right wavelength range. Eliminating the intermittancy problem is a pretty huge draw. Plus, you'd use a lot less land area, which is good from an ecological perspective

coffeetable posted:

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.

Eh, not really. Dirty bombs have never really been a thing except in sensationalist news pieces and politics. If you're a terrorist, then you want a bigass explosion that causes a lot of death and destruction. A dirty bomb doesn't accomplish this any better than a normal bomb, and meanwhile you're going to have to handle a bunch of radioactive material while you build it, putting yourself at far greater risk. The radiological material from a dirty bomb might cause a slightly higher incidence of cancer in the local area of the explosion, but that's not going to appear on a headline for probably many many years. This means that you'd have to go through a lot more risk and effort to build a dirty bomb for basically no added benefit.

And the larger the blast, the less effective it is as a dirty bomb; a larger blast spreads the radiological material over a greater area and actually makes it less effective because the dosage/area is now smaller.

tl;dr The concept of a dirty bomb is scarier to most Americans than the actual results of a dirty bomb explosion, dirty bombs aren't a an actual thing, no more so than a conventional bomb

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

jigokuman posted:

Isn't lifespan another major issue with solar panels? The numbers I have seen indicate around 30 years of service, which is good, but not quite enough to say, put on your roof when you first purchase a home and then forget about electricity bills for the rest of your life, which is what I, at least, imagined when I looked into them.

Isn't that wrong in most geographic locations, especially with subsidies? I know that in Arizona and Hawaii you can even get state subsidies on top of the federal subsidies, and you end up paying off the panels in 5-10 years. Yeah you have to replace them eventually, but they seem to pay for themselves pretty quickly in most places.

If I remember correctly, there was a goon in A/T who did a thread about his DIY home solar installation, which took like 7-8 years to pay off, and he lived somewhere in the midwest (Ohio I think?)

e: Basically I think that solar PV is the way to go for a lot of our green energy. It's basically a way to convert a ton of useless surface area into an electricity generator. The downsides are that you need some pretty uncommon elements to make PV panels, and they're not cheap to make, but it seems like this is sort of a low-effort way of getting more green energy.

Bip Roberts
Mar 29, 2005

QuarkJets posted:

The downsides are that you need some pretty uncommon elements to make PV panels.

That's only pretty much only true for PV technologies that you can't buy today.

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

Dusseldorf posted:

That's only pretty much only true for PV technologies that you can't buy today.

Is it? I'd love to know more, what's usually used to make PV panels today?

Bip Roberts
Mar 29, 2005

QuarkJets posted:

Is it? I'd love to know more, what's usually used to make PV panels today?

By far the most common solar cells on the market today are single crystalline and polycrystalline silicon. These are pretty high efficiency cells but they are also relatively expensive because it requires a ton of energy to melt silicon. They are basically made from only silicon and aluminum, which are the #1 and 2 most abundant elements in the crust. There are a number of emerging technologies like thin film CIGS (Copper indium gallium selenide), Cadmium Telluride, and Gallium Arsenide PV which use compounds that could be in shortage if they were to be upscaled to be a significant percentage of total energy production. Although these look very promising there is also emerging technology to more cheaply make silicon cells like ion implantation lift off processes that would greatly reduce their cost. Also there is a lot of research into making thin film solar with earth abundant materials.

tl;dr. Earth abundance is very important to think about but it is by no means a show stopper in PV.

Edit:
Here's the current solar production stack. By far most of what's produced today is silicon although there are some new non-silicon technologies emerging in the market. Most notably is the CdTe production by first solar at the bottom. This is exciting but these less-earth-abundant technologies are not axiomatically the future of solar.

Bip Roberts fucked around with this message at 08:03 on Sep 5, 2012

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

Thanks, that was a very informative and interesting post! It's good to know that material abundance isn't a real concern for PV anymore

Bip Roberts
Mar 29, 2005
It's a big concern, it's just not at all the current holdup to adoption. I was objecting to the phrasing "you need some pretty uncommon elements to make PV panels", which is false. Efficient PV doesn't necessarily need rare materials. It, however, might very well be a problem later if a non-earth-abundant technology proves to be way more cost efficient than the field.

Piell
Sep 3, 2006

Grey Worm's Ken doll-like groin throbbed with the anticipatory pleasure that only a slightly warm and moist piece of lemoncake could offer


Young Orc

QuarkJets posted:

Eh, not really. Dirty bombs have never really been a thing except in sensationalist news pieces and politics. If you're a terrorist, then you want a bigass explosion that causes a lot of death and destruction. A dirty bomb doesn't accomplish this any better than a normal bomb, and meanwhile you're going to have to handle a bunch of radioactive material while you build it, putting yourself at far greater risk. The radiological material from a dirty bomb might cause a slightly higher incidence of cancer in the local area of the explosion, but that's not going to appear on a headline for probably many many years. This means that you'd have to go through a lot more risk and effort to build a dirty bomb for basically no added benefit.

And the larger the blast, the less effective it is as a dirty bomb; a larger blast spreads the radiological material over a greater area and actually makes it less effective because the dosage/area is now smaller.

tl;dr The concept of a dirty bomb is scarier to most Americans than the actual results of a dirty bomb explosion, dirty bombs aren't a an actual thing, no more so than a conventional bomb

The entire point of the dirty bomb is the concept. People freak the gently caress out over ATOMZ, and that's all a dirty bomb needs to do is cause the panic.

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

Piell posted:

The entire point of the dirty bomb is the concept. People freak the gently caress out over ATOMZ, and that's all a dirty bomb needs to do is cause the panic.

Yup, which is why a dirty bomb isn't actually a real concern when discussing pros and cons of nuclear power. Improving public perception is what needs to be done, not worrying about dirty bombs

Aureon
Jul 11, 2012

by Y Kant Ozma Post

GulMadred posted:

]their wind modeling is deficient, since they haven't used site-specific historical data (e.g. anemometer readings). Instead they've taken the total observed output of actual wind farms during the study period and then scaled it up to produce minute-by-minute values which reflect the greater capacity of the proposed system, but they haven't properly accounted for regional variation.

Three thousand wind turbines in one site WILL reduce efficiency and reduce winds. (as the power to be harvested is finite)

Also, is the weather in Australia THAT sunny to deliver 4800 hours of sunlight per year? we're talking a median of over 13 days of direct sunlight per day.

Office Thug
Jan 17, 2008

Luke Cage just shut you down!

Hobo Erotica posted:

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.

There's a lot to talk about unfortunately. Layman understanding may vary. It's long :words:, so you can add parts you like to the OP if you want.


Thorium is used as fuel in what's called a breeder reactor. These reactors use neutron radiation from nuclear reactions to transmute very common fertile isotopes like thorium-232 and uranium-238 (depleted uranium) into new isotopes that can themselves be used as fuel. You thus get a pseudo-catalytic cycle going on where burning fuel goes on to create more fuel. Thorium itself is non-fissile, so it can't be used in weapons. The fuel it's converted into is uranium-233, which like pretty much anything else that fissions, can hypothetically be used in weapons. However this is difficult for the reasons below.

There are two ways to use thorium, either as a solid fuel or as a liquid. In both cases thorium has some nice advantages over current enriched uranium fuel,

Availability: Much more common than the isotope of uranium we currently use as fuel, being 430 times more abundant in nature. Thorium is currently considered a radioactive waste byproduct of heavy rare earth mining, and is one of the reasons the heavy rare earth industry is restricted in western countries. Thorium itself is harmless in terms of both toxicity and radioactivity. Can be extracted from terrestrial rock economically, making its availability limitless.

Waste profile: Because thorium-232 is much lighter than both uranium-235 and uranium-238 currently used in reactors, its chances of absorbing excessive amounts of neutrons to become transuranics is vastly reduced. This makes thorium a cleaner alternative. However it will still produce fission products like radiocaesium and radioiodine when fissioned.

Proliferation resistance: The cleaner waste profile also limits the amounts of weaponable isotopes that will be present in thorium waste, like neptunium-237 and plutonium-239. In addition, breeding thorium into uranium-233 also yields a lighter isotope, uranium-232, which is extremely radioactive and cannot be extracted from the uranium fuel once it is created. This isotope requires heavy lead shielded electronics (and people) to handle and can be tracked from space, making it a huge handling hassle for any would-be rogue state.

There are some disadvantages as well,

Fuel cycle problems: Breeding uranium-233 from thorium is a multi-step process with an intermediate product, protactinium, which must be allowed to radioactively decay to your uranium fuel away from any additional neutron radiation. If protactinium is not isolated from neutrons in time, it will absorb more neutrons and basically kill your nuclear reactions. It can be dealt with but it adds a significant (costly) level of complication.

Need fissile starting material: To start the breeding process, you're going to need very enriched uranium (above 20% U-235, compared to conventional reactor grade enriched which is only 5%), or plutonium. The former is expensive while the latter is a proliferation concern.

The most common way to use thorium is as a solid fuel additive in light or heavy water reactors. Heavy water is much more expensive with the payoff that it increases your breeding capabilities by a landslide, meaning you can use more thorium while needing less uranium. Thorium is traditionally added to conventional enriched uranium solid fuel, which yields a number of slight benefits,

Solid fuel pros: We've used thorium commercially in these types of systems before. Regulations trust solid-fueled water-cooled reactors the most. Lowered fuel cost vs. conventional uranium reactors. Improved waste profile.

Solid fuel cons: Advantages are minimal. Reactor safety doesn't improve. Waste becomes extremely radioactive because of the same uranium-232 that makes uranium-233 from thorium unsuitable for bombs.

The internet-phenomena method of using thorium is in a liquid-fuel state, typically in molten salt reactors. These systems are true breeders in that once you have bred enough fuel from thorium, you can stop using enriched uranium and just stick with what you've made indefinitely. You can even breed more fuel than what you started with initially. Using thorium in an MSR changes the game quite a bit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LFTR

In this type of reactor, you dissolve your thorium and your uranium in a molten salt kept above 700 degrees celcius (1300 farenheit) by the heat of the nuclear reaction. You get a ridiculous number of benefits from this,

Online reprocessing: Fission products can be extracted from the fuel mixture while the reactor is running. This limits the amount of neutron poisons that accumulate in the fuel, and also limits the severity of any fallout that might occur during an accident by a factor of several thousands. In accident scenarios, active removal of fission products also ensures that there will be very little residual radioactivity that would otherwise keep the fuel very hot in a meltdown-style scenario, allowing the fuel salt to expand and cool safely.

Waste destruction: Breeders produce an excess of neutrons which can be used to transmute transuranics into isotopes that will readily fission, and subsequently cause them to fission. This means that you can permanently destroy transuranics with these types of systems. You can also stabilize most fission products by transmuting them into stable isotopes. As a result, the reactor will not produce any long-lived transuranic waste and only short-lived fission products, which will last 300 years instead of tens of thousands. The amount of waste per fission will be much smaller as well. Finally, the reactor's fuel could be spiked with current nuclear waste to destroy said waste.

Air-cooling: The high operating temperatures of these reactors allows them to be air-cooled instead of water-cooled. That means you can put them almost anywhere on earth rather than being limited to the side of large bodies of water. Air-cooling also makes the reactors more efficient in heat-to-electric conversion, by about 10-15%.

Scalability: Molten salt reactors run hot but at low pressures, meaning that they can fore-go the huge pressure vessels that are typically required by water-cooled systems. Some thorium-using MSRs also produce minimal neutron radiation towards the outside world, meaning that the core will not make its surroundings radioactive. These attributes make thorium MSRs highly scalable and viable all the way from the size of a conventional power plant to the size of a dinner table. A dinner table that produces 30+ MWe, enough to power two fully loaded locomotives or a small community. You lose out on efficiency as you scale down (the neutronics become really weird) but it makes your reactor very flexible in terms of siting.

Factory production: The small sizes possible with thorium MSRs means that they could be mass-produced in factories. This is the single biggest advantage with these systems in that factory production makes regulatory licensing a lot faster and simpler. Regulations currently account for 70-80% of new reactor costs. Regulations become easier because the reactors are identical and produced from a standard model. This is what France did with its larger scale systems, and how it got up to 70% of its total power to come from nuclear.

Isotope synthesis: Thorium breeders are special because they open up new pathways to extremely rare synthetic isotopes. Uranium-233, bred from thorium, is part of the neptunium decay series. You gain access to exotic isotopes like thorium-229, used in nuclear clocks and theoretically possible to use in rechargeable nuclear batteries. It also gives you access to bismuth-213, which is currently the most potent anti-cancer agent known for extremely labile cancers like leukemia. On the heavier side, you get a lot of light transuranics like plutonium-238, which is currently the roadblock to NASA's future planned deep-space missions. A thorium MSR would produce 15 kilos of Pu-238 per 1 gigawatt of electric capacity. For the record, Russians have sold a significant part of their inventory, 14 kilos, to NASA over the entirety of the space program.

Cost of operation: Once built, thorium MSRs will be money-printing machines with almost no fuel cost and minimal maintenance costs. The system will pay for itself in isotope and stabilized fission product sales alone.

Cannot melt down: The salt is configured to expand as it heats up, helping to dissipate heat from radioactivity as well as stopping chain reactions before they get out of hand. You can also put very simple hands-off systems that will automatically drain your reactor of all its salt into underground passively-cooled containment if for whatever reason you lose power to the reactor or things go awry. The trick there is to use a frozen plug of salt, kept frozen by fans, which will melt as soon as the fuel gets too hot or the fans lose power.

Accident mobility is limited: In addition to everything noted so far, the fluoride salts themselves are not very mobile in the environment. Most are insoluble in water, so even if a meteor smashed your reactor into the water table or something, the fuel salt would still not contaminate the local water supply to any appreciable degree. Fluoride salts also solidify once they cool down, locking any radioactive products within them and keeping any mess localized.


Unfortunately, it's not all rose-tinted glass either,

Cost to build: Thorium MSRs will not be cheap to build. There's no getting around this. The molten salt is a mix of expensive alkali metals like berrylium, the reactor parts need to be made out of a special fluoride/heat/radiation resistant nickel-heavy alloy called Hastelloy-N, and it needs to be a custom melt of Hastelloy which can also resist attack from some fission products in the salt (notably Tellurium attack). The initial starter fuel will need to be uranium enriched to 20% of higher, or plutonium which has compatibility issues with the salt. You also need to figure out how you'll deal with graphite moderator degradation overtime in the reactor salt.

Development: These reactors were basically brushed under the carpet 40 years ago by the Nixon administration. The only country that's put serious effort into revitalizing them is China. In addition, most regulatory bodies won't even consider the existence of thorium MSRs because they are simply too different.

Regulatory hurdles: This is basically the reason why no one except China is ever going to develop these reactors. Regulations play a huge role in dictating what will and what won't happen. So far it looks like regulations only care about 1 thing: pressurized and boiling water reactors. Everything else can gently caress off as far as they're concerned.

Office Thug fucked around with this message at 14:32 on Sep 5, 2012

RichieWolk
Jun 4, 2004

FUCK UNIONS

UNIONS R4 DRUNKS

FUCK YOU

QuarkJets posted:

Yup, which is why a dirty bomb isn't actually a real concern when discussing pros and cons of nuclear power. Improving public perception is what needs to be done, not worrying about dirty bombs

This is a wasted effort; the public in general is stupid as gently caress and has no intention of changing that. Humanity would be better off just working to improve efficiency and technology; gently caress what stupid people think.

Nintendo Kid
Aug 4, 2011

by Smythe
Especially since you could also make dirty bombs by robbing hospitals of radiation sources used for various treatments. Or hell, by breaking open a bunch of smoke detectors or old glow in the dark watches.

Mc Do Well
Aug 2, 2008

by FactsAreUseless

RichieWolk posted:

This is a wasted effort; the public in general is stupid as gently caress and has no intention of changing that. Humanity would be better off just working to improve efficiency and technology; gently caress what stupid people think.

Are people that stupid and fearful or are they misinformed? How much does the media actively ignore nuclear power, or emphasize nuclear disasters, while minimizing fossil fuel disasters?

I heard a story on NPR a few days ago about how grid power isn't reliable in India so there is a big market for industrial private generators, and having reliable electricity is becoming a class divide.

Problems with infrastructure were mentioned but limited to coal and oil. Nuclear Power was not mentioned at all (yes I know there is strong resistance to Nuclear in India).

Nuclear has a PR curse. It will not be dispelled because when the media, politics, and the energy industries intersect; you'd better believe almost all the money exchanged is from fossil fuels.

Dirty Bombs are a brilliant political deflection combining the ratings-grabbing public fear of atomz and terrorists.

Adam Curtis covered Nuclear pretty well in the last episode of his great (and prophetic) 1992 series "Pandora's Box"

http://youtu.be/1ON-EnaRtAw

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

RichieWolk posted:

This is a wasted effort; the public in general is stupid as gently caress and has no intention of changing that. Humanity would be better off just working to improve efficiency and technology; gently caress what stupid people think.

You won't ever be able to build more nuclear reactors with that attitude. PR is the single largest roadblock to a nuclear nation, and I am certain that this is an obstacle that we can overcome.

RichieWolk
Jun 4, 2004

FUCK UNIONS

UNIONS R4 DRUNKS

FUCK YOU
If we're having trouble convincing people that basic facts are true, that does not seem like an obstacle that is surmountable. Hell, a good chunk of the population believes that simple vaccinations cause autism and evolution is a bunch of junk.

How do you fix stupidity, when people are unwilling to be educated, when they would rather believe something demonstrably false than consider that they have been wrong about something?

And you're right, we'll never build as many nuclear power stations as we should because of this. Every bit of effort spent on making nuclear energy appear safe and practical can blown away by a single commercial with ominous music and a mushroom cloud at the end.

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

RichieWolk posted:

If we're having trouble convincing people that basic facts are true, that does not seem like an obstacle that is surmountable. Hell, a good chunk of the population believes that simple vaccinations cause autism and evolution is a bunch of junk.

How do you fix stupidity, when people are unwilling to be educated, when they would rather believe something demonstrably false than consider that they have been wrong about something?

And you're right, we'll never build as many nuclear power stations as we should because of this. Every bit of effort spent on making nuclear energy appear safe and practical can blown away by a single commercial with ominous music and a mushroom cloud at the end.

But that's not true, education can demonstrably correct public perception. Cigarettes used to be considered good for you (by the ignorant public at least) and everyone smoked, but today cigarette usage is way down and people are at least aware of the hazards. Even if you're pessimistic and believe that usage is down only because of cigarette taxes, you still can't deny that people are more aware of the hazards of smoking

E: what needs to happen is an anti-coal ad campaign that pushes nuclear power as an affordable alternative

QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 02:28 on Sep 6, 2012

LP97S
Apr 25, 2008
That and the coal and natural gas lobbies that just bombard voters and legislators with bullshit. The only company that isn't is Exelon energy, which has actually been pushing hard for carbon emission restriction because it's got the infrastructure to survive and thrive with it. They produce 34 gigawatts of power generation broken up into 55 percent nuclear, 24 percent natural gas, 8 percent renewable including hydro, 7 percent oil and 6 percent coal.

Now this could be good because Exelon already has plenty of experience with nuclear energy, on the other hand maybe I should use the bad word in the US and say "Nationalize all power systems" to save the time and effort.

EDIT: Education can help, but only after decades of muzzling. If we could ban coal companies from advertising and tax the ever living hell out of it, there might be some progress in 30 years

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

Aureon posted:

Three thousand wind turbines in one site WILL reduce efficiency and reduce winds. (as the power to be harvested is finite)

Also, is the weather in Australia THAT sunny to deliver 4800 hours of sunlight per year? we're talking a median of over 13 days of direct sunlight per day.

Would the efficiency reduction be that large? I was under the impression that wind contained several orders of magnitude more energy than what a vast array of wind turbines could ever extract, do you have any numbers?

Bucky Fullminster
Apr 13, 2007

Lots of good information being posted. Thanks GulMadred for taking care of the ZCA 2020 questions, and office thug for the detailed run down on Thorium. When I have to chance to process it all I'll try and condense it into a digestible paragraph. Also same for dusseldorf for PV.


QuarkJets posted:

E: what needs to happen is an anti-coal ad campaign that pushes nuclear power as an affordable alternative

This would be good, if nuclear power was your end goal. But I don't see why it should be. Energy Generation is the goal. I'm all for an anti-coal ad campaign, and there are various activist groups around the traps doing just that. But there's no reason it can't be used to push for a transition to renewables.

Where I see there potentially being a place for nuclear, is in countries like India and China. They're the ones with huge energy demands, most of which is generated by fossil fuels at the moment, that's where the punch of nuclear could be best used I think.


Here's an encouraging article about Germany:

German grid reaches record reliability in 2011

quote:

On Monday, Germany's Network Agency announced that the German grid only had a downtime of 15.31 minutes, even lower than the already impressive 17.44 minutes of downtime during the period from 2006 the 2010.

Last spring, when the German government resolved to shut down eight of the country's 17 nuclear plants within a week, there was concern about whether the country's grid would remain reliable. Not only did the country avoid a major blackout during the winter, but its availability actually increased over the average going back to 2006, when reporting began.

In 2006, the Network Agency began calculating the SAIDI value (system average interruption duration index), which can be seen on this website in German. The index does not include planned interruptions or downtime due to natural disasters; rather, it only includes unplanned interruptions lasting more than three minutes.
- The German grid has proven to be the most reliable among reporting EU member states year after year since it began reporting in 2006.

Germany's performance can only be properly appreciated in the context of other countries. As the chart to the left shows, Germany has consistently been the leader among reporting EU member states since it began reporting in 2006. The differences are also not slight, such as 15 minutes versus 20 minutes. Instead, the number of minutes of grid interruptions in other countries (such as France, which had 62 minutes of SAIDI downtime in 2007) is often several times the German level.

Importantly for international readers, the Network Agency reports specific figures for the number of grid operators in Germany: 864 grid operators reported 206,673 grid interruptions on 928 separate grids. These figures clearly show that the German grid is as splintered as those in other countries and is not a monolithic state-driven entity.

Germany clearly demonstrates that a very high level of grid reliability is feasible with a high penetration level of intermittent wind and solar power. Indeed, Denmark, which has an even greater share of wind power in Germany, also has a similarly reliable grid, and as the chart shows above grid reliability in Spain has actually improved dramatically over the past few years even as it ramped up its wind and solar power.

By way of comparison, the United States had a SAIDI of 240 in 2007, which would put the country at the back of the ranking in the chart. It has been estimated, for instance, that grid downtime in the United States costs the US economy around 150 billion dollars a year, equivalent to four cents per kilowatt-hour (see this PDF).

http://www.renewablesinternational.net/german-grid-reaches-record-reliability-in-2011/150/537/56183/


And if that's all a bit heavy, here's a good ad which many may have seen but which is still great, speaking of clever marketing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mTLO2F_ERY
http://youtu.be/2mTLO2F_ERY

This is the sort of stuff we need. If we can use the power of marketing for good, we'll have a much better chance of making this happen.

PYF energy ads.

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

Hobo Erotica posted:

Where I see there potentially being a place for nuclear, is in countries like India and China. They're the ones with huge energy demands, most of which is generated by fossil fuels at the moment, that's where the punch of nuclear could be best used I think.

That's the United States, too :confused:

Bucky Fullminster
Apr 13, 2007

QuarkJets posted:

That's the United States, too :confused:

Yeah but I see the US as having more ability and opportunity to go for renewables. Developing countries are just that, developing, and their demand will be increasing faster than already developed countries. So they have more of an excuse to 'cheat' with nucelar, to satisfy their growing consumption, without compromising their opportunity to industrialise. That's just my reading of it though. But some nuclear plants in the US wouldn't hurt too I guess.

blacksun
Mar 16, 2006
I told Cwapface not to register me with a title that said I am a faggot but he did it anyway because he likes to tell the truth.
I posted this in the other thread about nuclear power however I think it's more applicable here.

How does a distributed energy grid with only small allowances for localized generation deal with installations that require their own localized generation. Examples bring;
Hospitals, government and military facilities, integral communication facilities. It would seem that for applications like this scalable generation like LFTR would be the war bet.

How about ultra remote locations? Here's an extreme example: McMurdo uses 8 millions gallons of oil a year. However there are numbers of other examples where running high cost lines will simply be too cost inefficient compared to localized generation.

Also worth mentioning are things like the global shipping industry, which according to Wikipedia accounts for around 4% of global climate effecting emissions.

It seems that if we can predominately use renewables for general grid generation, we should. However it seems that there are a number of industries and uses that simply cannot rely on 100% renewables (*at the moment or in the near to mid future).

Mc Do Well
Aug 2, 2008

by FactsAreUseless

LP97S posted:

Now this could be good because Exelon already has plenty of experience with nuclear energy, on the other hand maybe I should use the bad word in the US and say "Nationalize all power systems" to save the time and effort.

Don't be afraid to say it. It really needs to be done. Convert the grid to nuclear, subsidize distributed renewables, and then carve the nuke program into state authorities that can be privatized at the leisure of the State Governments.

Once we've developed all this we can sell the knowledge and technology to India and China :)

Bucky Fullminster
Apr 13, 2007

blacksun posted:

I posted this in the other thread about nuclear power however I think it's more applicable here.

How does a distributed energy grid with only small allowances for localized generation deal with installations that require their own localized generation. Examples bring;
Hospitals, government and military facilities, integral communication facilities. It would seem that for applications like this scalable generation like LFTR would be the war bet.

How about ultra remote locations? Here's an extreme example: McMurdo uses 8 millions gallons of oil a year. However there are numbers of other examples where running high cost lines will simply be too cost inefficient compared to localized generation.

Also worth mentioning are things like the global shipping industry, which according to Wikipedia accounts for around 4% of global climate effecting emissions.

It seems that if we can predominately use renewables for general grid generation, we should. However it seems that there are a number of industries and uses that simply cannot rely on 100% renewables (*at the moment or in the near to mid future).

How are these installations getting by now without LFTR? The present grid has blackouts and brownouts, how are the places you're talking about doing it at moment?

In any case, Bio Diesel generators should be able to take care of most of your problems. They use 2nd generation fuels - offcuts of agricultural processes.

Ultra remote locations are best left off the grid anyway. No point in laying that much cable when you can just generate it yourself.

We don't need to get too concerned about "100% RENEWABLES NO EXCEPTIONS". If you've got a scenario where it can't be done, fine. Bit of stretch to say 'we need a LFTR in there' though, especially when you've got no figures to back it up.

As for ships, I'd like to see more sails being used. And blimps/baloons/airships as well. Nuclear powered ships could be a good idea, they'd need to be quite rigorously tested for safety obviously.


Should we include discussion of transport in here as well? As someone pointed out, it is an energy issue, so may as well I guess. Can kick it off with this:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/aviation/airships/4242974

Aureon
Jul 11, 2012

by Y Kant Ozma Post
As an Italian, i can tell you what has happened in Germany: They've started importing energy from France, driving up the energy cost for the whole european supergrid.

Energy generation is the goal, and in the medium term, nuclear is the most efficient way to go.

Okay, read the relevant parts of the report. It tells no outright lies, but it does a good hand of selective comparisons, varying the standards at will.

First, it does a comparison, and shows 11-19 years for a nuclear reactor built.

Build times of 4 years is considered "normal", the rest is bureaucracy/local issues - which have been handwaved for the placing of gigantic solar/wind plants, and for comparison's sake, shall be handwaved for nuclear too.
(Yes, there will be disparities, but in case of a large-scale implementation, we can reasonably assume that identical plants would not require multiple approvals)

It goes on listing an expected operational time of 30 years for nuclear plants: In reality, we've already non-genIII make the 60 years mark, and gen III is reasonably expected to run for 80 years.
This, obviously, is an huge difference, especially since the cost of energy isn't expected to plummet (but technological advances could make it so) anytime soon.


It also talks of a "60% efficiency" in relation to solar CST, but doesn't specify that this is insolation energy to heat energy: Further conversion from heat to electricity results in total efficiency of less than 20%.

It goes on to talk about 2012-costs of Solar CST of around 8c/KWh: But the world's flagship solar CST plant has actual energy costs of 27c/KWh. (Again, cost of buying the energy off the plant: No transmission costs, no backup costs, no externalities of any type - since most are irrelevant at low penetration)
8c/KWh is certainly possible, but it isn't anywhere near "tested". It's wishful thinking.

Or doing a neat trick: assuming capital costs are 0. (30 years of a 50MWh plant running at 0.41 uptime, completely disregarding maintenance and efficiency losses, would give 7c/KWh: Upon giving a capital cost of 3% (over inflation, so 5% real minus 2% of inflation in energy prices), we're at 17c/KWh, still without any accessory cost - build only.)

Doing the same neat trick to Nuclear, we have an energy cost of about
(US cost, maintenance and fuel notwithstanding, but should even out with intermittent backup needed for solar: This point is, admittedly, up for further debate and analysis. It could heavily swing either way, but this is a strawman anyway.)

US build cost for an AP1000, estimated on $4b (Western-ridicolous-overregulation: 60-80% less in China, partly due to labor costs, partly due to absence of NIMBY/overregulation)
1000MW, 0.95 uptime, for 80 years: 665TWh, netting a cost of 0.07c/KWh.(divide by four for china prices)
Upon factoring of capital costs, 0.8c/KWh. [This price is much more sensitive to cuts in the interest rate than the solar's one, since it's over 80y and not 30y.]
(Nuclear is corrected for a production start after 4 years of the payment, solar is modeled as day one start)

Please note that i don't really think nuclear energy costs 0.06c/KWh: It's a strawman, to show what would happen upon using the same (wildly incorrect) method of cost analysis.
For any remark about bond markets being under 2% as of now: Won't last (we really hope it won't); if it does, applies to both.(nuclear benefits more)
So do energy price-shocks (solar suffers less)




Substantially, if we take for good the pricing of this report, we'd be able to take for good the china planned pricing for nuclear: Which is 1b/1gw, netting a cost for full nuclear carbon-free australia at roughly 60 billion instead of 370.

Substituting real (world-built) costs in just the CST:


Andasol, the largest plant built, has a cost of $380m for 50MW. It also has an uptime of 0.41, despite claiming "full energy production during the night".
Going by the report's own statistics, the insulation of Spain has a coefficient of roughly six; while Australia's is roughly 7.5. So, the expected uptime is probably around 0.5.
The correlation of downtime in different sites warrants an overbuild of at least 2x, plus backup: netting a needed power of ~90000MW, for an hefty price tag of $684b, plus backup(Possibly wind), plus transmission.

This is very simple number-crunching, of readily available (or contained itself) information.
If a standard is applied to one method of energy generating, and comparisons are made, every competitor should get the same treatment.


For now, solar's place (until new efficiency improvements, which could come as soon as 10 years if things proceed this way - solar cost was over 50c/KHw ten years ago, and it's at 27c/KWh now) is probably confined to off-grid locations, or, in hot weathers, as peaker for air conditioning power intake (since it obviously strongly correlates to the need for such power)

Mc Do Well
Aug 2, 2008

by FactsAreUseless
Blimps are an excellent addition to the commercial air fleet. If you can make PVs that are light/flexible enough it could power itself.

We will never stop using fossil fuels entirely. We use petroleum products for things other than fuel so the chemical infrastructure will still be needed. Casual air travel might use blimps, but there will still be jets when you need to be there in a few hours. In terms of efficiency a ship is very different from a car, giant diesel tankers will probably be around for awhile (I don't think the US Navy is keen on anyone else making nuclear ships)

Isolated facilities use big rear end diesel generators I believe. I've read about mini nuke plants that aren't much bigger than a substation.

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

Hobo Erotica posted:

Yeah but I see the US as having more ability and opportunity to go for renewables. Developing countries are just that, developing, and their demand will be increasing faster than already developed countries. So they have more of an excuse to 'cheat' with nucelar, to satisfy their growing consumption, without compromising their opportunity to industrialise. That's just my reading of it though. But some nuclear plants in the US wouldn't hurt too I guess.

I'm not sure that I agree; the US has a lot to gain from renewables, but its energy demands are so massive already that it probably can't go exclusively onto renewables any more easily than India or China could. All of these nations should be investing in nuclear power and abandoning coal power. They should get as much renewable energy as possible, but there's no feasible reason to expect the US to run completely on renewables

e: I'd like to make the point that the fight shouldn't be renewables vs nuclear; they're both clean forms of energy that are relatively inexpensive, albeit nuclear provides a smaller electrical bill plus other benefits at the cost of having to deal with waste products. The fight should be US energy production with coal power vs without. If we want to get rid of coal power, then we need a combination of nuclear + renewables.

QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 04:56 on Sep 6, 2012

Aureon
Jul 11, 2012

by Y Kant Ozma Post

QuarkJets posted:

I'm not sure that I agree; the US has a lot to gain from renewables, but its energy demands are so massive already that it probably can't go exclusively onto renewables any more easily than India or China could. All of these nations should be investing in nuclear power and abandoning coal power. They should get as much renewable energy as possible, but there's no feasible reason to expect the US to run completely on renewables

e: I'd like to make the point that the fight shouldn't be renewables vs nuclear; they're both clean forms of energy that are relatively inexpensive, albeit nuclear provides a smaller electrical bill plus other benefits at the cost of having to deal with waste products. The fight should be US energy production with coal power vs without. If we want to get rid of coal power, then we need a combination of nuclear + renewables.

Wind and ad-hoc solar are of costs often lower than nuclear itself: Mass solar yet isn't.
Nuclear is around 8c/KWh: ( http://web.mit.edu/nuclearpower/pdf/nuclearpower-update2009.pdf )
while solar is around 27c/KWh: (Andasol requested to sell energy at this rate, or wouldn't get built)



Reality is that handwaved the capital costs, as the US is currently able to do, the costs are MUCH lower, for both forms, and surely much lower than any fossil fuel, in the medium to long term.

Winks
Feb 16, 2009

Alright, who let Rube Goldberg in here?

QuarkJets posted:

Would the efficiency reduction be that large? I was under the impression that wind contained several orders of magnitude more energy than what a vast array of wind turbines could ever extract, do you have any numbers?

Yes, wind turbines generate very large wakes and of course extract energy from the air, slowing wind speed to turbines in rows behind.

Here's a paper on it.

Fun graph:


Cool picture:

Winks fucked around with this message at 05:21 on Sep 6, 2012

the
Jul 18, 2004

by Cowcaster
One thing I've never really seen a clear answer to is how much it takes to power the average "nuclear" family to live in America. And how much it would cost for that family to produce their own power via solar panels, wind turbines, etc.

And initiatives at the local level to force homes and business to be at least "carbon neutral" if not give power back to the city via usage of things like solar panels would help reduce the overall power needs of the country tremendously.

Imagine if every home of the 55,000 homes in my town had solar panels on the roof? Our power demands would drop tremendously.

Aureon
Jul 11, 2012

by Y Kant Ozma Post

the posted:

One thing I've never really seen a clear answer to is how much it takes to power the average "nuclear" family to live in America. And how much it would cost for that family to produce their own power via solar panels, wind turbines, etc.

And initiatives at the local level to force homes and business to be at least "carbon neutral" if not give power back to the city via usage of things like solar panels would help reduce the overall power needs of the country tremendously.

Imagine if every home of the 55,000 homes in my town had solar panels on the roof? Our power demands would drop tremendously.

8c/KWh for nuclear, 35c/KWh for solar, give or take.
Solar roof-PV if horrible in all terms (unless you're off grid)

John McCain
Jan 29, 2009

the posted:

One thing I've never really seen a clear answer to is how much it takes to power the average "nuclear" family to live in America. And how much it would cost for that family to produce their own power via solar panels, wind turbines, etc.

And initiatives at the local level to force homes and business to be at least "carbon neutral" if not give power back to the city via usage of things like solar panels would help reduce the overall power needs of the country tremendously.

Imagine if every home of the 55,000 homes in my town had solar panels on the roof? Our power demands would drop tremendously.

Average electrical energy use for an American household is about 11.5 MWh annually.

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GulMadred
Oct 20, 2005

I don't understand how you can be so mistaken.

the posted:

Imagine if every home of the 55,000 homes in my town had solar panels on the roof? Our power demands would drop tremendously.
It depends on where you live and on how the equipment is deployed (e.g. roof slope, efficiency of your inverter, etc). Government subsidy programs can improve the ROI for installing the panels, but EROEI is dictated by physics and engineering. If your area gets heavy snowfall then the energy payback on your PV panels is going to be lousy; they may even get destroyed by ice or hail before they've reached parity. The majority of US electricity is obtained by burning fossil fuels, so setting up marginal or sub-marginal rooftop PV is an anti-environmentalist proposition.

Unless you've invested heavily in battery arrays, then your family is not going to power itself (because your generation and consumption patterns always peak at different times of day, and often in different seasons). You'll sell power onto the grid sometimes (which is a big pain in the rear end for the local utility to deal with; many of them refuse to accommodate household feed-in until forced to do so by legislators/regulators) and you'll buy it back at most other times.

Suburban wind turbines are probably a non-starter. Your neighbours (and/or HOA) will bitch about visual pollution, loss of property value, noise, bird kills, EM allergies, zoning disputes, etc... And if the idea actually catches on, then the ROI/EROEI will decline as each newly-constructed windmill casts its shadow across the existing ones. You might even see neighbours suing each other, as "early adopters" seek to block new deployments (in order to safeguard their own investment). Also, most windmills have a minimum cut-in speed - they'll generate zero power until the wind exceeds a critical threshold (which is why they're built en masse in high-wind-intensity corridors, rather than being scattered about the country at the whim of homeowners).

If you want to build "green households", then you should aim for the low-hanging fruit first:
  • energy-efficient windows and doors
  • rainwater collection for lawns and gardens
  • improved insulation standards
  • encourage the use of local construction materials
  • etc
If you're determined to put something on your roof, then you'll get more mileage out of a solar thermal system than a PV array.

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