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QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

CommieGIR posted:

It seems like Oil Shale would be prohibitively expensive compared to just drilling more wells.

Right, but what I'm asking about is that hypothetical scenario where drilling more wells is no longer more profitable than using oil shale, not the situation today. I'm having trouble pinning down the actual price at which oil shale becomes reasonable to use

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QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

Australia's energy consumption in 2009 was 250 GWh TWh. 25 GW at peak is great, but I really wish he didn't present it like that (because with solar power your output fluctuates throughout the day and throughout the year, and simply knowing the peak value on the brightest summer day isn't particularly useful even if 25 GW is a significant amount of power).

In other words, I'm not going to put much credence into that guy's interview. If he's presenting realistic, factual numbers then there's definitely already a paper out there showing the actual numbers, and I'd rather see that.

e: ^^^ For us Americans, there was a long set of articles in Scientific American some years back describing how the US could convert to 90% solar power by 2050. It was an expensive-as-gently caress plan and would also require the government to subsidize an overhaul of the US electrical grid (which we should do anyway), but it was completely feasible. That said, it didn't sound like a plan that anyone was seriously going to put into place, and I think that Germany and Australia are the only two big countries that have serious plans for national solar power.

e2: Whoops, it was 250 TWh, not 250 GWh. 25 GW of peak power wouldn't come anywhere close to meeting 250 TWh of electricity production.

QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 19:37 on Nov 20, 2012

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

Pander posted:

You're off by several orders of magnitude. It was 250 TWh, not GWh.

Whoops, read B as M. Yeah, it was 250 TWh

e: Oh man, even if you were somehow able to generate 25 GW of power for 12 hours a day every day (absurd, 25 GW is probably the peak absolute-best-case-scenario), you'd still only hit 110 TWh in a year.

None of this guy's claims even make sense :psyduck:

QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 19:40 on Nov 20, 2012

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

Hobo Erotica posted:

I wouldn't say I'm fixated on solar specifically.

Fixated on not digging things up, yeah probably.

You'd have to try very hard to have a national electric grid that doesn't dig things up. I think a bunch of wood-burning power plants and some natural geothermal vents would probably be the limit

QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 21:21 on Dec 5, 2012

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

Aureon posted:

We just need to fake having invented Fusion.
Everybody loves Fusion.

Set up a fission power plant that also has solar panels on it and call it a Fusion Power Plant

(get it? Fusing two different energy sources? Whatever...)

silence_kit posted:

I didn't really get that at all from his post. It sounded more to me that he said that improvements to solar energy are imaginary.

However, if you want to make that point, then OK. Point noted. The reasons why the improvements to nuclear energy have been ignored by American politicians have been discussed to death in this thread. This thread probably should more appropriately be titled "The Nuclear Energy Apologism Megathread" or maybe the "The Nuclear Energy Excuse Generation Megathread."

It already causes fewer deaths per year than any other energy source and it's more efficient than anything else. Nuclear power doesn't require much apologism, just defense against insane skeptics.

(I concur that we need to implement solar, wind, and geothermal as well; we should have all of these and nuclear power)

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

CombatInformatiker posted:

Since there are a lot of nuclear fission proponents in this thread, could you give me some pointers/links to how the highly radioactive waste products can be safely stored/treated? Not trying to argue, just genuinely interested, and I didn't find the answers on Wikipedia (nor in this thread).

I highly recommend several chapters of this book:

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

The Insect Court posted:

The difference is we've been seeing real improvements to real solar power systems deployed in the last few years, while all the talk from nuclear fantasists is about next-gen reactors that don't exist except on paper.

"We shouldn't build a modern nuclear power plants because we haven't built any modern nuclear power plants yet."

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

CombatInformatiker posted:

I've read 1.5 chapters of that book (Google didn't let me read any further), and it seems to be a little simplistic (multiplying the chance of an accident by it's severity and conclude that there's no increased danger? Come on, you can't be serious!) and clearly biased towards nuclear energy, so it's not something I'm looking for.

That's actually a very common risk assessment technique; do you mind explaining the problem that you have with assessing danger on the basis of both severity and likelihood? If severity is your only concern then are you just constantly worrying about earthquarkes and tsunamis destroying your house at any moment?

It's also a book that is not particularly biased toward anything, it's explaining the science behind different politically-important ideas. It's not a political science book, it's a popsci book written by a physics professor at UC Berkeley. As a fellow physicist, I endorse it as being scientifically accurate, and it's worth your consideration even if it doesn't already jive with your own misconceptions and biases.

(and saying "I'm looking only for resources that already agree with my worldview" is not the best way to learn about a topic)

And 2500 tons/year is actually a very small amount. Remember, nuclear waste is extremely dense. By volume it's not all that much. Yucca Mountain would have been plenty of space for the indeterminate future even if we don't ever reprocess anything

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

Quantum Mechanic posted:

So have you been missing that whole thing where my only objection to nuclear power is in light of the existence of renewables as an alternative, or do you seriously think that I am opposed to the construction of nuclear plants end of story?

How about as a realistic alternative? Because renewables really aren't enough

Or do you only mean to say that renewables should be used where feasible and that we should use nuclear to cover the remainder? I don't think that anyone disagrees with that

Here's a question: how do you feel about thorium reactors? Thorium is a waste product of many mining operations, and we have a ton of it right now because we don't have many good uses for it aside from nuclear energy. Would you be satisfied if we built a bunch of thorium reactors and didn't bother mining any more uranium?

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

CombatInformatiker posted:

"Severity times probability" is fine for low and moderate severities, but not for severe threats. Hypothetical example: if heater A is 10% cheaper than heater B, but has a 1% that it starts a fire which burns down your house, you don't conclude that you save 10%*99%=9.9% or that 1% of your house burns down. It also doesn't take into account systematic risk, like a correlation between leakage of containers. That's why I called it "simplistic".
Note that I didn't disagree with the conclusion (nuclear waste can be dealt with rather securely), only with that particular way of reasoning.

But that's not what the book is saying, either. You wouldn't multiply by the percentage savings, you'd multiply the cost of an occurrence (your house burning down) by the probability of that occurring (1%) and then compare that to the probability cost of the other heater (which would have its own non-zero probability of burning down your house).

Multiplying the likelihood of the risky occurrence by its impact is a perfectly legitimate way of dealing with risks at all severity levels because severity is already part of the formula. That's the whole point. When assessing risk you have to consider severity and probability, not just one or the other. Bananas are mildly radioactive and might give me cancer if I ate enough of them, but the probability of that occurring is so low that I'm definitely not going to stop eating bananas despite cancer being an extremely severe consequence.

And systematic risk is included because it's the total probability of a catastrophe, not just the probability of a single failure point like you seem to be implying.

quote:

That's not what I'm saying and that's not what I'm doing.
Besides, I came here with an anti-nuclear bias and asked for good sources of information, so that I could form a rational opinion. I think now that nuclear energy is a relatively safe technology, and that we need it at least in the short and medium term if we want to replace fossil fuels. So yeah, so much for "doesn't already jive with my own misconceptions and biases". And if you don't believe me, do us both a favor and just ignore my posts.

You asked for good sources of information. I provided one, and then you said that it's not what you're looking for.

What are you looking for?

QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 09:35 on Apr 4, 2013

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

It's not, really. Thorium reactors are something that we should be moving forward on, but it's not something that anyone in the US is really seriously trying to do (or at least not that I've heard of)

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

CombatInformatiker posted:

Well, that's what I've been saying: it's not as simple as just multiplying two numbers. I didn't say that it's impossible to estimate the risk for a given storage method.

But it is as simple as that, that's what Gimby is saying. You multiply probability of occurrence by the severity of occurrence. That is exactly what is going on in the book. If we don't mine the uranium at all, then you still have a bunch of uranium in the ground, so the two scenarios that we're comparing are mining and using the uranium vs not mining the uranium at all.

Probability of raw uranium being radioactive = 100%
Normalized units of radioactivity = 1
Risk = 1*1 = 1

Probability of radioactive waste container leaking = 0.1%
Normalized units of radioactivity of leaking container = 1000
Risk = 1000*0.001 = 1

This means that the risk incurred by not mining at all is equal to the risk incurred by using the uranium and then containing the 1000x more radioactive waste products in barrels that only have a 0.1% probability of leaking.

There is nothing wrong with this technique. The only criticsm that can be levied would be directed at the accuracy or relevance of the respective numbers, which is not what you were doing originally when you dismissed the book.

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

Boner Slam posted:

There is something wrong with this technique, which is that it inheretly assumes that the expected values fully characterize the distribution - as Bernoulli.
Don't get me wrong, if you'd actually be able to find out the "probability" of of leakage then you could calculate which leakage you'd expect, and this could be equal to a certain outcome such as mining. But you can't, because it does not exist as a binary case.
And because of this, nothing you said is essentially applicable to reality. It would be very easy to assume a distribution of leakage with the same "risk" (ie. expected value), yet a much higher probability to leak a lot of material. It would have the same expected leakage. This could be characterized as more risky and in fact this is very often the case out there.
Which is also why risk is not equal to expected value, which is a valid criticism for any of these arguments. It is a fake argument and it is meaningless to reality. And any numbers derived on the basis of such a model would be misleading.


Ya... no. This is exactly the reason why your insurance rate is not based only on this.


Edit: Not that enough entities have made this mistake before of course. But it is not correct to describe reality this way, especially for risk analysis.

I'm not sure what else to tell you. It's very common in engineering to estimate quantities that we don't know with perfect accuracy, such as the probability that a dam will burst or the probability that a radiation container will leak. If you throw that away then you essentially throw away all of risk management, a cornerstone of engineering.

My point stands anyway; the book is doing risk management in the same way that everyone but you does risk management. If you want to try to convince everyone else in the world that the standard method for estimating risk is incorrect, then by all means

e: If you have 10000 containers and 1 leaks after 10 years, then the "probability" of leaking after 10 years is 1/10000. Why did you put quotes around "probability?" We can estimate the probability of a container leaking after N years, it's not an impossible feat. I don't understand what your hangup is here, could you try explaining it a little more?

QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 06:52 on Apr 16, 2013

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

Boner Slam posted:

I wrote my criticism of that argument. Either reply to that or don't.

He did reply to your criticism of that argument. You claimed that car insurance doesn't work this way, but it most definitely does. The rest of your argument is based on a misunderstanding of how risk assessment is performed.

quote:

It doesn't matter and that was not the argument. There is something wrong with this methodology when doing this comparision.

That was exactly the argument:

CombatInformatiker posted:

I've read 1.5 chapters of that book (Google didn't let me read any further), and it seems to be a little simplistic (multiplying the chance of an accident by it's severity and conclude that there's no increased danger? Come on, you can't be serious!) and clearly biased towards nuclear energy, so it's not something I'm looking for.

CombatInformatiker was complaining about the way in which the book was performing risk management. The book performed risk management in the exact same way as everyone else, and there's nothing wrong with assessing risk in this way. You've suggested that there is a problem with this, but you didn't actually provide any real reasoning for it; your argument can be boiled down to "if someone did a risk management calculation in a dumb way, then their results would be inaccurate!" Small leakages and large leakages are treated as different types of risk with different severities. The barrels don't randomly explode after N years, so the probability of occurrence of a "large leakage" is close to zero

In other words, your criticism of risk management is based on a misunderstanding of risk management.

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

Pander posted:

For wind or solar to matter in the United States, there would need to be a massive east-west HVDC network set up, as most of the wind assets are in the west, and sensible solar assets are in the southwest. There currently is no such network. The current network will shut down entire regions of the country due to sudden spikes or dips in power supply. We have a really poo poo network, and most Americans don't spend much time thinking about this as a problem until you have things like the great New York blackout a decade ago. And then we quickly forget as a nation again, because energy policy is apparently boring/hard.

That's not true at all; you could power most of the southwest US on solar and wind alone using the grid that we already have. That would "matter" a lot

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

CombatInformatiker posted:

But burning methane is clean if it is produced carbon-neutrally, right?

SolarFuel, a German company, is building a CO2->CH4 (including H2 generation) demonstration plant with 6MW input and 54% estimated efficiency. They're also planning a commercial 20MW reactor with 60% efficiency (75% with combined heat usage), due in 2015.

That's a solar power plant where all of the energy is used to convert CO2 into CH4, rather than a natural gas plant.

Pander posted:

Quarkjets: I agree! I also think working out some kind of massive solar field in the Sahara that could feed Europe via HVDC would be a wonderful development.

However, I live in Central IL. We have a lot of wind farms here despite poor wind resources due to close access to nuke plant grids (I've toured the wind farm next to LaSalle station when I toured the station a few years back). Solar has no chance in, well, most anywhere. The land is far too valuable as cropland. We would need to be an importer of solar, and that would require fewer transmission losses.

So it's cool, but the whole "99.9%" really needs the modifier "in Australia", because "In America" would be an ignorant fantasy of the blind. I was trying to highlight just one simple large-scale problem that requires an expensive engineering solution that no solar technomarvel can overcome until such time as we develop cost-effective large energey storage tech.

We'll probably have to wait for GooglePower before we get a true smartgrid in the US.

I'm of the opinion that regions with poor access to renewables, such as many states in the central US, should use nuclear power. Eventually transporting renewable electricity via HVDC sounds like a great plan further down the road

But yeah, Australia is in a far better position than most countries when it comes to access to renewable energy.

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

CombatInformatiker posted:

Uh, yeah, that's exactly what I wrote :confused:

You asked a question, and my answer was "yes" plus some words. Basically if a gas plant is only burning fuel produced by solar power plants, then really it's just a facility that consumes solar-produced energy.

It's like how an electric car isn't a green energy vehicle if all of its power originally came from a coal power plant.

In other words, you're right, the source of the energy is important; gas produced by solar power is green fuel.

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

CombatInformatiker posted:

Fun fact: physical processes can be reality even if we don't understand what is happening. No one knowing what happens exactly inside the device does not, by itself, imply it being a scam. If the measurements from the experiment are correct (and if the experiment has not been tampered with), then it is not a scam.

If I put a bunch of kerosene in a lamp, light it, and put that lamp in a box, then that box will appear to be emitting energy. This experiment that I have just described is equivalent to the experiments in the paper. If I claimed that the box was a cold fusion reactor, and my proof was a few energy measurements plus some IR photography, would you find my claims dubious?

quote:

Rossi is not a scientist, he's either an inventor or a scam artist. Either way, he doesn't care about being taken seriously as a scientist, he cares about making a lot of money. As for science: science often progresses by someone noticing an effect which can't be explained by current theories. If the device works and goes into production, others can reproduce the results, or take it apart and study how it works.

You have this backwards. Rossi didn't "notice an effect", he built this device specifically because he thought that it should produce energy. This is a heavily engineered device. You're falling for a con artist.

e: Also, don't be fooled just because there's a paper on arXiv. Literally anyone can put papers on arXiv. For example, there's Taking a shower in Youth Hostels: risks and delights of heterogeneity and Classic Nintendo Games are (NP-)Hard, both of which have way more validity and are way more interesting than the Rossi paper.

QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 06:57 on May 26, 2013

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

CombatInformatiker posted:

It's not Rossi's experiment, it's not Rossi's measurements, and it's not Rossi's paper. At least get your facts straight. If you claim that the experiment and the paper was not done by the authors, please say so explicitly.

No one said that it's Rossi actually conducted the experiments or measurements. It's "Rossi's paper" because Rossi got together with some guys and asked them to make measurements and write a paper. This is a futile line of argument to take, are you really just arguing for the sake of arguing?

The device in question is just part of a big scam BTW

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

Ervin K posted:

So what's with people's love for solar PV? Everywhere I read about renewable energy, what people seem to be most excited about is the dropping price of photovoltaics. Personally I'm not convinced; for starters they require significant amounts of rare earth minerals to produce so that alone makes things difficult. I especially don't understand the logic of solar parks like this one:

That's a lot of lost green space that's necessary for oxidization and the local ecosystem, as well as carbon absorption. I understand building one of these in the middle of the desert, but why clear a forest for it? Now don't get me wrong, I don't think PVs are bad, they would be a great way to complement the existing power sources, by dropping them on top of warehouses or supermarkets, or anything else with a large roof. I just don't see the value of building an entire farm. Isn't wind ultimately the best renewable source (outside of hydroelectricity)to replace fossil fuels that we have right now? It doesn't need to be built close to the equator for maximum efficiency, and produces more power.

People love solar PV because you can't easily install solar thermal on your roof. Solar PV allows homeowners in many areas to reduce electricity costs. Lower PV prices means more market accessibility and even lower PV prices in the future

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

Kafka Esq. posted:

Every time I read about thorium it basically sounds like magic bullet technology. I've watched the thorium remix, and I'm pretty familiar with the ability to use it in CANDUs or new molten salt reactors. Now it can be used as a solid fuel in more typical boiling water reactors? I feel like the other shoe has to drop at some point.

The only magic that I'm familiar with when it comes to thorium reactors is that thorium is cheap to obtain, so you're driving down the cost of fuel. Nuclear fuel is a tiny fraction of the cost of nuclear energy, though, and no one is excited to build nuclear reactors in the US, so it's all just a non-starter

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

hobbesmaster posted:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
Emissions are bad, but the gas is 1/3 as expensive. Economically renewables make no sense so unless gov't does something to change that...

I think that we could solve a lot of problems with renewable vs nuclear vs gas vs coal if we just internalized all of the hidden costs that some types incur (especially coal). For example, what if we required coal and gas plants to capture 100% of their emissions? And what if we required mining/fracking operations to sock away a certain amount of cash for ecological restoration projects? And huge solar tracts would have to pay into ecological habitat funds because of the vast tracts of land that can be displaced by solar farms.

I imagine that nuclear would probably be the cheapest, if not second cheapest to renewable energy, if we just internalized the real costs of energy.

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

JohnGalt posted:

I know it can work under the right conditions (where it is sunny all of the time) but it has technical shortcomings.

No one has ever claimed that solar power is perfect, but what about all of the panels in Germany of all places? They're the world's top PV installer, but their country isn't particularly sunny. There's no reason that a very sunny state like California or Arizona shouldn't be doing something similar

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

Phanatic posted:

It's also markedly different from current nuclear power because that is actually capable of generating useful quantities of electricity. We could build how many LFTRs for the cost of one NIF?

I have a friend who works at the NIF who pretty much confirmed all of your critiques when I asked him about the story. Sadly, the article title is misleading and makes it sound as though they have broken even with energy output = energy input, but they're nowhere near that

It's still a cool facility and I'm glad that they're working diligently on the fusion problem from another angle. Science is filled with unexpected breakthroughs, which is why we fund basic research

That said, I don't think that anyone should hold out for nuclear fusion. I'd prefer that we build a bunch of nuclear power plants and start throwing solar panels on more homes/buildings with high levels of sun exposure

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

Arghy posted:

I get to listen to fukushima crap all day long and when i try to challenge what their saying they put their hands on their ears and scream LALALLALALA. Its motivating me to try to become a physicist so i can spend my days smashing their arguments all day long.

As a PhD-holding physicist, I can confirm that the people you argue with won't give a poo poo about your degree, your intelligence, or your facts.

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

CommieGIR posted:

Are you talking about THIS map?



If so, its utter poo poo.

Did they just put a little nuclear symbol on every nuclear power plant or something? What the gently caress is this?

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

So if I feel like it I can put a radioactive source next to a geiger counter that's hooked up to the internet and convince a bunch of wacko's on the internet that there's a huge radiation leak in my state? That's pretty cool!

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

Quantum Mechanic posted:

:stonk: You're joking, right? Get your poo poo together, Canada.

We have some wind turbines on Maui. I get really depressing headaches when I think about how hard it was to get them installed in the first place

(most of our power comes from burning oil, but the turbines do offset a small chunk of that)

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

Arghy posted:

How feasible is it to dig into the earth and create a giant tunnel of geothermal heat?

It's expensive as gently caress

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

redreader posted:

Moving from the UK (london) to north california, my mood brightened instantly because there's WAY more sun here. In the last year I lived in London, most of the summer was overcast, for months at a time. I can imagine solar being really, really poo poo there and not working well.

My wife is from Arizona, and when I visited there recently I was anecdotally asking people if they knew anyone who used solar energy. Nobody did, it seemed.

In Arizona I can anecdotally say that it's becoming more popular each year, since people are noticing the nice federal and state subsidies that make installation relatively cheap.

In Hawaii solar is a booming industry. Not only are there nice subsidies in place, but electricity here is also loving expensive, so solar is more appealing. The issue is that a lot of homeowners here don't have that much money, and those who do have a lot of money only live here for part of the year. And a lot of people rent. Despite that, you see more homes with solar panels every month, and even government buildings are putting up PV panels over their parking lots.

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

West Virginia Declares State Of Emergency After Coal Chemical Contaminates Drinking Water

quote:

Residents of nine counties in West Virginia have been told not to use or drink their water after a chemical used by the coal industry spilled into the Elk River on Thursday. Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin declared a state of emergency as more than 100,000 customers, or 300,000 people, are without safe drinking water.
“Don’t make baby formula,” said West Virginia American Water Company president Jeff McIntyre. “Don’t brush your teeth. Don’t shower. Toilet flushing only.”
The chemical, 4-Methylcyclohexane Methanol (MCHM), is used to wash coal of impurities and spilled from a tank at Freedom Industries into the river. While the amount of MCHM that spilled wasn’t immediately known, West Virginia American Water has been conducting water quality testing every hour. According to Laura Jordan, a spokesperson with the water company, they believe the chemical is leaking at ground level and “there is a possibility this leak has been going on for sometime before it was discovered Thursday,” WSAZ reported.
Local officials described MCHM as smelling like licorice and looking like “cooking oil floating on top of the water.” The West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources said symptoms of MCHM exposure include “severe burning in throat, severe eye irritation, non-stop vomiting, trouble breathing or severe skin irritation such as skin blistering.”
Though the spill occurred Thursday morning, West Virginia American Water didn’t provide its customers with a warning until evening and, as Al Jazeera reported, several were angered by the lack of information, particularly regarding what should be done if they had already used or ingested the water.
Early Friday, Tomblin announced that the White House approved a federal emergency declaration to help with the urgent water situation. Soon after the governor’s declaration on Thursday, residents flooded local stores for bottled water and disposable dishes. “It was chaos, that’s what it was,” cashier Danny Cardwell told CBS News.
West Virginia American Water has emphasized that once contaminated by MCHM, the water cannot be treated. As a result, schools in at least five of the counties will be closed Friday and hospitals, restaurants, nursing homes and other establishments in the area are also banned from using their water as the entire system is flushed out and testing continues. As of early Friday, Freedom Industries, “a full service producer of specialty chemicals for the mining, steel, and cement industries,” had yet to comment on the spill.

So basically West Virginia's water supply is hosed and is only suitable for use as toilet water, per official recommendations. It will be interesting to see whether this gets any real attention, since it's the coal industry and everyone just kind of expects coal to be lovely (but god forbid we even consider using nuclear power)

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

Ardennes posted:

Eh, it isn't like nuclear power doesn't have a bunch of hoops on its own and I think nuclear expansion is a good thing. Even if you have public opinion on your side, building nuclear power plants is expensive and at this point the US government really isn't interested in making that sort of investment.

(Actually clean air standards have really improved the air quality in LA over time, it is still pretty bad in certain regions but SoCal if anything shows the improvements than can come with regulation.)

It's cheaper than renewables, and you can build a facility that produces a GW of nuclear power much faster than you can build a GW of wind or solar power even if you just examine peak power for the renewables. This is important if we want to shut down as much coal power as possible as quickly as possible (we really really need to do this, it's really the most important thing)

We really need renewables but we also really need nuclear power, and it gets tiresome when renewables advocates sabotage the entire environmentalism movement simply because they don't like nuclear power as much. It's a necessary evil

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

Trabisnikof posted:

Nuclear is not cheaper than Wind or Hydro using a levelized cost of electricity.

Also, it is taking about 2 years to bring a 1GW wind project online in the US (Buffet's MidAmerican, its in 3 farms) and it takes about 4 months in China. When was the last time a reactor was built in the west that wasn't at least 2 years delayed?

May I see where you're getting your numbers from? I have never seen Wind or Hydro providing a lower GW/hour except in tables that explicitly include government subsidies, which shouldn't count

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

VideoTapir posted:

Why shouldn't they count?

Because you could create the same subsidies for nuclear.

Trabisnikof posted:

the EIA's levelized cost of electricity for new generation?

http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/electricity_generation.cfm


Remember, that nuclear gets free loans and that the capital costs are the largest factor of nuclear's cost. Also levelized numbers assume that there will be 0% cost overrun and 0% delays, something no nuclear project in the west has achieved in the half century as far as I'm aware.

Also from the EIA numbers, showing they don't include tax credits.




Can anyone provide a source for how nuclear deregulation would actually work in a way that provided a cost savings without increasing systemic risk? Just fiating that "no regulations == experimental reactor designs become production designs", doesn't really count.

You didn't mention this:

EIA Report posted:

In the tables in this discussion, the levelized cost for each technology is evaluated based on the capacity factor indicated, which generally corresponds to the high end of its likely utilization range. Simple combustion turbines (conventional or advanced technology) that are typically used for peak load duty cycles are evaluated at a 30-percent capacity factor. The duty cycle for intermittent renewable resources, wind and solar, is not operator controlled, but dependent on the weather or solar cycle (that is, sunrise/sunset) and so will not necessarily correspond to operator dispatched duty cycles. As a result, their levelized costs are not directly comparable to those for other technologies (even where the average annual capacity factor may be similar) and therefore are shown in separate sections within each of the tables.

In other words, if you were to move to a pure hydro and wind power system then you'd need to start implementing a lot of energy storage mechanisms that would significantly increase your levelized cost. As a form of intermittent power production they are cheaper in general, though the report says right there that the levelized costs are not directly comparable between nuclear and wind/hydro.

Also left out of the estimate for wind is the fact that cost/GW increases as you build more wind farms and expand your existing ones. It's not clear from this report how that would effect the long-term average cost of wind if we started going full-bore on building more wind turbines

QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 20:11 on Jan 14, 2014

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

Rand alPaul posted:

As of about 2000, when my parents were buying a home in Arizona, the cost to put solar up on the roof was ridiculous. You were better off just throwing that money into a nice swimming pool. I can't imagine it has changed much under the brilliant Republican leadership that state is known for.

In 2011-2012 Arizona had a huge statewide subsidy program, which when combined with the federal subsidy actually made solar panels a good investment. The only problem was that electricity is already pretty cheap (you just use a lot of it) and peak load in your average suburban home occurs at night rather than at day, so most of the power that you'd produce would be sent back to the grid where you're getting paid pennies on the dollar for it. I don't know if those subsidies are still around, but this was a lot more recent than 2000

And there were also a bunch of different companies that would do the work of putting up solar panels on your roof, so obviously there were some people buying them.

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

ohgodwhat posted:

Even in Arizona? Sure, a good chunk of people turn up the temperature when they're gone during the day, but nobody wants to come back to a 110 F house when they get back from work during the summer.

Running the A/C all day is way too expensive for a tiny bit of additional comfort when you walk through the door after being gone for 9+ hours. Maybe the richer suburbanites can afford that, but most people don't run it while they're gone. But they do run the A/C throughout the night, because it's hard to sleep in a hot room

I grew up in Arizona, it's what everyone did. I'm sure that peak average grid usage is during the day, but in domiciles it's a different story

QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 20:08 on Jan 16, 2014

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

Renaissance Robot posted:

I could have sworn we had the whole "[raw] output has exceeded ignition energy [but not even close to what we actually put in because our process is laughably inefficient]!" thing months ago.

Before that, I was under the impression that nobody seriously considers this reactor design to have potential for power generation because it can't be scaled up and there's no way to insert fuel/remove waste without turning it off. :crossarms:

These are actually the same results, but this time the results have been published. It's just as deceiving and unexciting as it was last time

Baronjutter posted:

Other than political reasons why is so much being invested in fusion over something far more practical like thorium? Why not refine nuclear technology we know works vs much harder and potentially impossible goal of practical fusion?

The NIF gets a lot of their money from the DOD

Pander posted:

Calling fusion a physics problem is calling the ability for humans to flap their arms and fly a biology problem.

Uh, no, it's not at all like that.

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

Pander posted:

Why not? Give us enough time with genetic manipulation and we'll get our drat bat wings within 100 years.

But then they wouldn't really be human anymore, argument crushed :smug:

QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

silence_kit posted:

You don't know what you are talking about. 90% of all solar cells are silicon cells and it doesn't look like that is going to change. Your list of elements in various solar cells that you Googled frantically to back up your bogus point that solar cells require rare elements and/or heavy metals is irrelevant. I think that you are more interested in bashing environmentalists than bothering to understand different energy generation technologies.

Are you aware that silicon solar cells aren't just a big panels of silicon that magically come into existence? The manufacturing of silicon cells results in the production byproducts, including extremely toxic silicon tetrachloride. Silicon cell production also produces sulfur hexafluoride, a greenhouse gas that The Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change estimates has an effect that is 25000 times greater than CO2 per molecule. Many silicon cells also still have heavy elements like lead in them, simply because that's a result of the manufacturing process.

I mean if you're going to accuse the thread of ignoring all of the downsides of nuclear (even if the thread hasn't been doing that), then why are you allowed to ignore the downsides of photovoltaics? I love solar power, but I'm not going to pretend that it's a boundless source of cheap green energy when it's not.

The reality is that electricity production loving sucks and all that we can do is minimize its impact on the environment as much as possible. As such, we should be using a mix of wind, solar, and nuclear power. 100% solar is an impossible pipe dream and every pro-solar advocate with a science degree knows that. Informed environmentalists accept that nuclear power is an extremely green energy source despite its downsides and that no energy source is perfect, unless it's a power plant that runs on the hopes and dreams of the nuclear fusion crowd.

tl;dr we need nuclear power right loving now stop bitching about nuclear power unless you want to continue choking on coal smoke, for gently caress's sake

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QuarkJets
Sep 8, 2008

Tasmantor posted:

I am, not him but GG on the bashing of a solar proponent!

In what loving sense? I stated very clearly that all forms of energy generation suck, not just solar, and that I'm a huge proponent of a mix of nuclear and solar. Do you have a disability that prevents you from comprehending more than one sentence at a time?

The world consumes a fuckton of energy each year. Solar can not provide enough power to meet this consumption rate without widescale ecological devastation due to enormous land use alone, especially when you account for how many more panels you need just to deal with things like weather patterns. People who advocate for 100% solar don't seem to have a counterargument to this, so apparently everyone agrees that you need a balance of various green energy sources rather than just placing silicon panels everywhere. I don't think that there's a single poster in the last 2 pages of the thread who opposes having some solar, but if they so much as mention nuclear power then you assume that they oppose all other green energy sources.

e: Reading the rest of this page, it's become clear that you're some sort of anti-nuclear gimmick account :shobon:

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