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(Working on an effortpost on current-age nuclear reactors, rounding up sources) To be honest, that plan looks like half wishful thinking, half political fabrication. But i may be wrong. The first number itself (1b for 220MW of solar) looks extremely optimistic, since the biggest solar plant built to date is 50mw; and 42'500 MW running for a year at "proven" (2400 h/y) would produce 102TWh, far off the 60% of the 340TWh missing from the equation. The plant would have to run for a median of 4800 h/y, double the PS20 rate, to actually do that. I haven't yet read the whole paper, but you should at least correct that "60% of target" in the OP, since it's wildly off figure. I'll withhold further comments until i've read the whole paper.
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Sep 5, 2012 02:16
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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.
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Sep 5, 2012 13:25
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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)
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Sep 6, 2012 04:28
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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 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.
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Sep 6, 2012 05:05
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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. 8c/KWh for nuclear, 35c/KWh for solar, give or take. Solar roof-PV if horrible in all terms (unless you're off grid)
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Sep 6, 2012 05:38
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QuarkJets posted:There have been some ask/tell threads on exactly this topic, and there are a lot of resources online for DIY roof PV and commercial roof PV Subsides are a solution in the micro, but change absolutely nothing in the macro. Solar water heating works like a charm, for much less. The main problem with PV is the real EROEI, which has to include the disposal of them - and since it's not just concrete and silicon, like thermal setups, it foots a substantial bill. The EROEI can be pushed easily beyond the expected lifetime, in non-optimal (sub-2000, which is still good) climates.
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Sep 6, 2012 13:06
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The scale of solar subsides, atleast in Italy, was for over ten years more than 100 times the total funding to solar energy research. I'm pretty dubious that subsides can overdo research funding, and the claim was simply that "consumer prices with subsides are not comparable to actual large-scale implementation", not that subsides do not help driving down prices (but i still hold the belief that direct research would fare much better); Perhaps the USA is more sane, but the subsides for Solar in Italy were so high they dwarfed the whole research budget (And 10 years later, the efficiency gain on rooftop PV is decent, but nowhere worth the investment - from 75% to 50% subsiding)
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Sep 6, 2012 15:26
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Bob Nudd posted:Why not? It seems people have a total phobia about spending money on generation plant that will be only used occasionally, but sinking money into storage for the exact same purpose is okay. In any study I've seen, the former option is economically preferable, even if that runs against intuition. Because solar outage has a very high correlation. 0.4 uptime, with high correlation, get problematic quickly when it's your main workhorse. We'd have to have full power needs on Solar only, full power needs on Wind only, and we'd STILL need backup.
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Sep 6, 2012 17:51
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Bob Nudd posted:Oh I understand it's a problem, and I used to think that storage is the heir apparent as a solution. After looking into it, though, it turns out that procuring more flexible generation is nearly always a cheaper solution than some magical giant battery. That's just the way the numbers run: I'll dig out a few papers if people would be interested. Of course: But "a more flexible generation" means no wind and no solar, for backups. And most backups are horribly inefficient, and if you've got a nuclear plant built as backup (coal has start-up times of 12h, nuclear more.. gets worse and worse) - what's the point in building the wind/solar? Remember, safety has to be guaranteed against once-in-500-years screw ups (since it's what we're requiring of nuclear), since a sudden loss of power can cause widespread damage in the grid. If not using batteries, you're using backup. And if you've built backup, and it's not fossil fuel, why aren't you running the backup 24/7?
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Sep 6, 2012 23:38
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Hydro as a backup is a terrible idea, unless you mean basin pumping. Hydro is active 24/7, it's completely free and has no running costs, why would you turn it off to build solar? For something to be a backup, it needs to be on-demand power, with low build costs and not necessarily low activity costs. Having something with an uptime higher than 0.95 as a "backup" is kind of ridiculous if there's nothing preventing it from running full time free of charge. ps: to be honest, not being on road makes sense. Are they getting subsides on top of it, like in the USA?
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Sep 7, 2012 12:25
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Turks posted:95% uptime and being cheap are both amazing reasons to use hydro as a backup, especially combined with it's ability to wind up and down extremely quickly. If we run it full time it isn't actually 'free of charge' because it would mean we need to build additional storage to ween ourselves off non renewable energy sources. .. Ok, again. You've got 1GW of Solar. Due to possibility of cyclones and large nubes, there's a real possibility it all can be down at the same time. So you need 1GW of backup. This backup is made in the form of 1GW of Hydro, which can run continuously. The question is: If you've got 1GW of hydro running continuously, and you need 1GW of power at all times; why have you built 1GW of something else, since you already have all the power you need?
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Sep 7, 2012 15:21
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Aureon posted:Hydro as a backup is a terrible idea, unless you mean basin pumping. it's also known as basin pumping. It's also very limited in scope, unless you build reservoirs for it especially, and not terribly efficient (around 40% if memory serves)
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Sep 7, 2012 19:34
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Searched a bit, nowhere mentions the time for which this is available, but they can run over 8 hours. Likely depends on the type of dam. I see this making a part, but like all hydro, it's hardly scalable. It's capped already. Another mean is needed.
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Sep 8, 2012 22:28
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Biomass is a a smokescreened fossil fuel. Or perhaps worse. It takes a crop location (which is co2 negative) and gets it to co2 neutrality. If we wanna do that, we may aswell burn gas. It also drives up food prices, which has a substantial death toll in itself. Using only organic waste to fill the needed power, to deliver a substantial amount of the nation's power, has no precedent, and no numerical base, as i could find (the study itself seems to present none at all) I'm also having more than one grudge with the methodology used in the study: It suffers from a lot of "different scales" used for Solar/Wind and Nuclear, handwaves problems, and assures "statistics show that.." and points to research tangentially related/theoretical only. I'm not really against CST, i fundamentally think that it works, just not at the prices and and quantity the plan tries to pass for "world-tested". I also have to admit that I'm trying to understand if molten salt really produces power during the night, or just stores it: Spain's plants (which have insolation coefficients of 80-100% Australia's, as the study reports), and Spain's plants have uptimes of around 0.35-0.42. To make the plan work, the needed uptimes are somewhere around 0.55, which is already unprecedented, and then correlation kicks in. [Remember that Australia has a very sunny climate, but it's also pretty far from the equator, making solar less efficient: Equator nets about 1350w/m^2, while it's about 800w/m^2 at the tropics) The plan also says MS can store energy for 17 hours, which is more than double andasol's 7.5 hours. It also talks extensively of a Solar Multiple, which boils down to "injecting more energy than the turbine can take out, for later use": But a 50MW plant with a multiplier of 2.6 is a 130MW plant, in land use and costs. Not in turbine costs, but that's not the bulk. And this is completely handwaved, as far as real-world built things go. Oh, and the modelling is not sourced anywhere. It cites an actuary who has done it, but it seems he's not very proud of that (can't find his site nor anything) It warrants further analysis, but biomass is shown to get fired (albeit barely) on a daily basis in the first graphics, and then it goes on to tell that it'd be barely needed (15GW) in the absolute worse case in two-years. I have some doubts on that (But could perfectly be wrong). It also seems to ignore any and all transmission power losses, which could be very significant if power has to run through half the continent. (Atleast, i can't find any explicit mentions: There's a "transport" indicator in some graphs, but seems inconsistent with pre-plan and post-plan) I've also found a gem hidden in the pages: The plan assumes a 30% power need reduction due to more-efficient technologies getting implemented. The price argument comes in, too. It is undoubtedly true that it would benefit from economies of scale, but wouldn't mass-producing mirrors for 50MW of power do that already? And how much "scale" you can reap from a project in which the factories producing the needed components would have to basically shut down on plan completion, in ten years? Again, if unproved economies of scale are magically applied unto mass-producing solar, why aren't they applied to mass-implementing nuclear (Which actually has a benefit in reducing bureaucracy needed for mass-production, and not just raw cost reduction)? All in all, it's not completely undoable: if the real-world cost of it, today, is about x3 the stated, x2-2.5 is probable. Using the same methods warranted for Solar/Wind, though, an equivalent plan using nuclear would cost (as i posted above) around one fifth (albeit having a longer deploy time.)
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Sep 9, 2012 03:57
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QuarkJets posted:Molten salt (as it pertains to solar power) is just an energy storage system. It produces power at night by releasing energy that was given to it during the day Yes, obviously. The question was about semantics: Those plants (seem) to be capable to input more power than they can output, and store the excess. That's the "Solar Multiplier", as stated by the project. If the project talks about a solar multiplier of 2.6, this is actually talking about building 2.6 times the said power (In receiving, so 2.6 more times mirrors/towers, but not 2.6 more times inverters and converters), and the cost of it doesn't seem to have been factored. Since the way to build bigger solar plants (bigger than 50mw) seems "put more of them side-by-side", i doubt the cost could go down that much. Since Andasol has 7.5h storage, and the solar CST proposed has 17.5h, with a solar multiplier of 2.6 (1.6 surplus) i would suppose the solar multiplier of Andasol is 1.6 (0.6 surplus), leading to 80MW real installed for the cost of $380m. By pure scaling, a plant of 220MW (572MW real absorption), should cost.. 2700m.
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Sep 9, 2012 11:50
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The study reports on US panels, though. China-made panels would be somewhat different. Also fails to report "90%" in relation to what: Coal releases something like 4 times the CO2 of gas.
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Sep 10, 2012 13:10
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Cartoon posted:You'd be surprised how many people want to know the answer to the question posed and the link is provided for informational purposes. Where the 'solar (photovoltaic) is a usable global solution' was claimed/implied is anyone's guess. Actually, the study is just theory, without going on how the manufacturer's energy is produced. Solar EROEI, ofcourse, varies: This study for examples, finds between 3-10:1 for operating installations, (not including dismantling), which means the cut of emissions in relation to the energy used is 66-90%. (Producing solar panels, which is energy-intensive, with solar energy, which goes at around three times market rate, seems not within economic possibility at the moment). [Basically, this study says "there's no consensus on where exactly the EROEI anything is, because facts themselves vary"] It's worth to note that hydro itself varies between 250+:1, which are the good sites, and less than 10:1, which are the scrap sites. Wind is rapidly going that way, with operational average of 18:1 (And the best sites in the world have been taken, so expect any newly built plant to be far less than that) (on wind power) quote:The operational studies provide lower EROIs because the simulations run in conceptual models appear to assume conditions to be more favorable than actually experienced on the ground.
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Sep 11, 2012 12:08
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20$/W means $60k for a 3kW... lasting 40 years,that's nearly 1mil kWh produced, for a value of $85k. Factor in capital costs and you're screwed, 40 years is pretty long. Probably still more feasible than solar energy which gets paid 0.27 to the kWh, though.
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Sep 12, 2012 12:13
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QuarkJets posted:It doesn't work like that; forty years later the generator will be producing much less power (unless the source has a long half life, but that requires a lot more fuel), so you get less energy overall than just (time)*(power on day one) If the source has an half life of 28y, it's roughly offset by the inflation of energy prices.
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Sep 12, 2012 20:21
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Install Gentoo posted:What exactly is hard to do about "people will naturally end up with more efficient appliances as the old ones break"? You literally have to actively strive to avoid getting a more efficient appliance when an old one breaks down. Everyone is already doing this. There is no difficulty. The difficult part is to not use less power when replacing old stuff. Does it matter that much? We're talking about cutting oil/gas/coal and replacing it, not dealing with future increases in power needs. Even if efficiency drops the power consumption by 50%, we still need to produce the other 50%, don't we?
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Sep 15, 2012 04:12
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Install Gentoo posted:It seems to me that we should simply force the power companies to permanently shut down the fossil fuel plants first when efficiency lowers demand. Some form of incentives to keep the renewables up? Tax credit stuff if they shut down coal plants first? Yes, but meanwhile, we should replace the other 2 PWh with nuclear/renewables, too.
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Sep 15, 2012 15:09
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Yeti Fiasco posted:I really wasn't thinking of just lightbulbs when I said that, that's literally the easiest and cheapest form of energy saving you can do, using that as a base mark for ease of efficiency as a whole is stupid. I'm substantially biased against, but i'll try. Pros: Nearly no human cost Nearly no rare materials needed popular as gently caress Somewhat scalable Cons: Cost (27c/KWh, Andasol's) Cost Cost (Three times, since it's over three times the normal cost) [ Unreliability (Even molten salt storing can't prevent a rainy day) Grid problems Lack of adequate batteries and/or long-range transmission ] Land use (Not an issue in central America or Australia, but come down in Europe to put a few scores of stadium-sized plants) heavily location-dependant Aureon fucked around with this message at 13:28 on Sep 17, 2012 |
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Sep 17, 2012 13:25
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Yeti Fiasco posted:No one ever seems to mention the sheer quantity of water you need to keep the vast array of mirrors clean, along with the difficulty of getting it where solar power is situated (In arid, sunny regions at high altitude). 500k m^2 is just a square of 700x700m, though. Nuclear has the smallest land footprint of anything.
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Sep 17, 2012 15:21
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Hobo Erotica posted:Far out man. 3 x ~1.1 GW reactors, just sitting there quietly, doing their thing, servicing 4 million people. Cost $6 bn to build. Operating costs are 1.3 cents per KWh. Sells it wholesale for 6.3 cents per KWh. All day, every day. Fuel? You can stockpile 40 years of fuel on-site, if you want. It's not like a coal plant. The quantity and intermittentcy of nuclear refuelings makes them more akin to maintenance than to fueling something. It's like changing an the oil of a car, not like getting gas for it. Waste could be just casked and desert-buried, but people must freak over it for nonsensical reasons, so it's actually stored until 99% of it isn't dangerous anymore, which means 50-100y.
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Sep 18, 2012 01:41
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Hobo Erotica posted:... Right, that doesn't answer my question though. Where do they get the fuel, and what do they do with the waste? Plain science would mandate: Cask it and drill it into my lawn. Heck, with 5mm of shielding and 10cm of concrete, i can redo my own house foundations with class 2 waste if you like. There's a massive explanation of how resistant are the casks and how non-dangerous is the waste in the nuclear power thread (thanks to bedpan), but it boils down to: 1) The stuff is dangerous, but dangerous in the sense "do not eat and do not vaporize". The small part that actually radiates substantial amounts of alpha or gamma waves should be drilled a bit deeper. 100m of rock is shielding enough for more or less anything. 2) In the case of "someone who shouldn't" getting it's hands on it: There's much worse stuff around, like anything present in a refinery or a chemical complex, if you want to go around killing people. 3) The casks are resistant to just about freaking anything, and shield enough that you could make a couch out of one. There's also a very tongue-in-cheek explanation of how pulverizing 80 tonnes of plutonium over france would not lead to any radiation danger. (Physichs explanation) Exclusion zone for a nuclear plant is nill. A nuclear plant nowdays is about as safe as the POTUS office, or a military bunker. If a permanent worker gets 50 mSv in a year there's something that has gone marginally wrong, and there's no shown correlation with doses under 100 mSv/year to any health effects. Linear correlation (radiation == tissue damage/cancer) begins at 1000 mSv, but 100+ mSv can have abysmal (but statistically shown on very large samples) effects on cancer rates. For reference, the background radiation of the earth itself, in inhabitable areas, swings from about 0.1 to 40. No correlation has been shown with increased cancer rates in relation to background radiation changes. Minor doses of radiation have actually reportedly increased health (as in increasing self-immunity mechanisms of humans against cancerous tissue, but not in the order of magnitude necessary to show a decrease of cancer rates) For the fuel: Mining, reprocessing, and if scarcity arises, can take impressive quantities from saltwater itself. Current available uranium at a top cost of $120/kg (current spot price) would last ~400 years(Varies between estimates, 200-800), and at triple that more than the human civilization is expected to last. (saltwater recovering becomes feasible) It's important to note that fuel cost in the energy production is nearly negligible, and tripling the cost of the fuel would highen the price of the price of the electricity produced by less than 15%. (Fuel accounts for 15-20% of operating costs, which are roughly one fifth of building+dismantling cost) Aureon fucked around with this message at 03:06 on Sep 18, 2012 |
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Sep 18, 2012 02:57
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:I've been wondering for awhile why we couldn't just stick waste casks in former chemical weapons depots. I mean you've already got these bunker complexes out in the middle of nowhere, they've already been built with the intent of containing much more hazardous substances, why not repurpose them and get more utility out of them now that we're destroying our chemical weapons stockpiles? because, YA'KNOW, nuclear waste is, ya'know RADIOACTIVE, not at all like, ya'know, chemical waste. And it's physically impossible that different problems have the same solutions!
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Sep 18, 2012 16:32
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Frogmanv2 posted:https://theconversation.edu.au/water-based-battery-a-step-up-for-renewable-energy-8906 Considering no existing battery (in the strict sense of the term) is anywhere near economical enough to smooth power peaks, and the article contains no numbers at all, with no sources, we can't really comment on this. On how it's phrased, could solve any problem. On how it really is, it's probably wishful thinking. But we can't tell, because there's no way to tell what this is. http://media.murdoch.edu.au/new-salt-based-battery-a-leap-for-green-energy is a bit better, but actually not much. My common sense is tingling, but it's an university site, so it's not really dismissible as "those dreaming hippies". Still, Stanford had "announced" basically the same thing atleast one year ago: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/106539-stanford-creates-everlasting-nanoparticle-battery-electrode-free-water-based-electrolyte e: Is Australia on the whole ridiculously anti-nuclear or something? e2: Onto "why don't we just throw away the nuclear "waste": dividing u-235 can (in a completely theoretical way), throw up any lower element. (In reality, just an handful.) In the "normal" waste, we get the really-precious Rhodium in significant quantities. quote:may be even more valuable for the fissionproducts it contains. To give one example, rhodium, a platinummetal, makes up about 2% of the fission products, and the price of rhodium fluctuates between the price of gold and ten times that. Aureon fucked around with this message at 03:05 on Sep 19, 2012 |
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Sep 19, 2012 02:43
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Frogmanv2 posted:All the major parties are against nuclear power generation. There is a staggering amount of NIMBYism, and we had the brits and the yanks testing bombs in the outback in the 50s. There's no "need" for basically anything, though. So, mass-scale indoctrination. Am i allowed to make Orwellian comparisons yet? (If the situation is the same as in Italy, where literally four people out of five believe nuclear reactors can explode, that speaks for impressive mindwashing)
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Sep 19, 2012 03:07
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QuarkJets posted:I think 4x is a bit optimistic if you really want 24/7/52 uninterrupted power without nuclear or fossil fuels nah, 4x is about right. Only, 4x is about "world-shattering" in the world of business. Frogman: Anyone informed enough to hang out in D&D won't be swayed by propaganda much. I'm not talking about anyone reading this, when i blame full brain-washing. Accidental misinformation, perhaps. But not really doublethink and the related stuff. Everyone against nuclear here (i really hope) has his qualms with Waste/dangers (which are unfounded in facts, but still, they're serious questions which need serious answers). If anyone thinks that nuclear is bad for no real reason, and continues to do so after reading the thread, well, i don't think he could stomach D&D for more than a week. Direct fuel-river water contact is reserved for occasions of real danger. About solar: Yes, Australia is basically the place where the odds for solar stack up in the best way possible. And it still isn't enough to compare with solar. The thing is, once ALL externalities are accounted (backup, maintenance, grid, land, et all for solar; fuel, maintenance, dismantling and waste storing/reusing for nuclear), there's no real reason to use Solar over Nuclear as long as nuclear is cheaper (after accounting for capital costs, for both, which makes odds against nuclear since it has longer building times). Even for 10%, there's no real reason to use Solar. The usual qualms about nuclear have all been thoroughly debunked in the other thread: Waste Danger Death toll Dismantling Land contamination And basically whatever you can pull up. The unsolvable problem is, of course, political. But it does not help to have supporters of ""renewables"" being obnoxious about nuclear. We're all on the same side on the fence. Boot the retards and corrupts (As an activist/engineer friend of mine said, "Greenpeace is always green, even when it takes bribes, since dollars are green"), and we can talk energy generation worldwide as we're doing here. The point is: Coal needs to get out. Facts are: In today's technology, nuclear is the only option which can take over >70% of the electricity generation, can scale to whatever you need, at reasonable prices. If the wholesale energy prices are 7-8c/KWh, don't you think that a project which sells energy at, at the very, very least 50c/KWh is excessive? (Andasol number doubled, as per ratios of the ZCA dream) Energy is the lifeblood of economy. Even more so once electric cars (And if we tout against coal, gas/oil cars are hardly better) get implemented. As the recent events have demonstrated, modern economies are more fragile than thought. Driving up energy prices by at the very least a factor of five would crash the world economy down. Unless we want to talk about economics, how we've got more supply than demand, and so doing the hi-tech equivalent of digging needlessly would actually help. Which, to be honest, is a respectable point of view. But i think we've actually got enough proper uses of labor and resources, such as actually making sure no one dies in stupid ways, decent welfare, or, god forbid, actually decreasing supply by shortening the work week. But that's an huge derail, which nevertheless could be useful. I find the keynesian motives the most credible motivation behind a solar-based plan.
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Sep 19, 2012 04:38
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spankmeister posted:Depends on your definition. In Chernobyl the reactor DID explode, and at Fukushima the reactors remained more or less intact, but (hydrogen) explosions DID occur. I mean atomic explosions, not hydrogen explosions. Atomic "Level-the-earth-within-500-km" explosions, since "everybody knows new nuclear is much more powerful than hiroshima!"
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Sep 19, 2012 14:25
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Flaky posted:Has any research been done on marrying nuclear fuel with a fuel cell type set-up instead of using steam pressure to push a big ol' turbine? Or are the energy savings of fuel cells inherent to eliminating the 'combustion' step of the cycle and thus not useful when using nuclear fuel? I am not aware of utilizing fuel cells to store heat-derived energy, and, to be honest, i fail to see the advantages. e: Did a bit of research, nothing planned for short time, but hydrogen cells may come in handy in the future, since very high temperatures are attainable. Security risks to check, since the modulators usually don't interact too well with hydrogen. Aureon fucked around with this message at 16:29 on Sep 19, 2012 |
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Sep 19, 2012 15:40
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GD_American posted:Natural gas is still in a massive glut, right? Last I heard from family in PA was they were capping wells left and right until prices rose. We should have enough for 50-100 years. Figure is very variable though (If oil's out, gas will be used in it's role, thus ending much more quickly) Gas still fucks over the climate, though. And produces a shitton of cancerous stuff. Which is why we need to cut fossils, in the coal-oil-gas order.
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Sep 19, 2012 20:24
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TheQat posted:That article seems outright horrible, from referring to environmentalists as "rabid" and referring to a "warmist cause" to implying that there are people who don't understand that wind farms aren't a consistent supply of energy (at least I hope there aren't people who are that dumb). I mean . . . with a quote like "Like all enthusiasts for “free, clean, renewable electricity”, they overlook the fatal implications of the fact that wind speeds and sunlight constantly vary" I think you just immediately know where the author's bias lies. Still, we're not types to dismiss arguments ad hominem, are we? Writer may have a terrible track record, but everyone says correct and incorrect things. A broken clock is right two times a day. This may not be the case, but dismissing arguments ad hominem is not warranted. No one has gone "This dirty hippies" on the dreamy ZCA plans before facts were presented. Let's see the claims: (using wikipedia data, but it's all secondary sourced) Germany wind produced in 2011 46,500 GWh, with an installed power of 29MW. Running the numbers, that means 17.9% uptime. He claimed 17, and while technically incorrect, i wouldn't go pants-on-fire on it. quote:The other is that, to keep that back-up constantly available can require fossil-fuel power plants to run much of the time very inefficiently and expensively (incidentally chucking out so much more “carbon” Still, obviously the rate of carbon-reducing for the wind power is, tops, 82%, since the rest of the time the backups are running. The claim is that short-warning plants' efficiency is atleast 25% inferior to continously-running plants. If the backup is "diesel generator", the statement is correct. However, i doubt that'd be the case. Let's assume that somehow, a magical grid can displace the energy from someone else, conveniently selling at market rate and not spot prices, for a 0% efficiency loss. This means that the energy has to go through, assuming a median distance of Paris to Berlin, just 900km. I'm currently unable to find a proper power loss source, but drawing parallels with the Vattenfall statistics which i casually have on hand ( http://gryphon.environdec.com/data/files/6/7310/epd21.pdf ) i would suppose no more than 5%. This claim is unsubstantial, but depending on the realities of the spot market and reserves, plausibile. Further research on the realities of the spot generation is needed. quote:Meanwhile, firms such as RWE and E.on are going flat out to build 16 new coal-fired and 15 new gas-fired power stations by 2020, with a combined output equivalent to some 38 per cent of Germany’s electricity needs. None of these will be required to have “carbon capture and storage” (CCS), which is just an empty pipedream. This makes nonsense of any pretence that Germany will meet its EU target for reducing CO2 emissions (and Mrs Merkel’s equally fanciful goal of producing 35 per cent of electricity from renewables). ]This is a valid claim. [/url] And since our objective is not running renewables for the sake of it, but reducing co2 emissions, we'll try to claim if there was a better mix of 35% renewables 50% coal. We'll leave out the elephant in the room, nuclear: It's not even up for debate that it'd work better, i think. If someone wants to dispute this, i'll run the numbers. Solar energy is to be assumed to be priced at over 27c/KWh. This comes from the Andasol plant in Spain. Obviously, insolation in Germany is lower than in Spain:  We can safely assume a 40% reduction in efficiency, being very, very forgiving. Wind costs are much trickier. We will assume that UK's £0.7b subsides (2010) were enough to put them up to market price (Ignoring backup, grid upgrades, etc, etc, so being very forgiving again) In the UK, 4000MW are installed, at a 25% uptime - netting 8.76 TWh/yr. So, the subsides on a per-KWh basis were 14c. So, the numbers are: (Coal and gas were taken from as many estimates as internet could spit out - Exact numbers are hardly needed, anyway) (no CCS, [CCS] Coal cost - 4-5c/KWh [5-10] Gas cost - 5-6 c/KWh [5-9] We'll assume Gas instead of coal is +1c/KWh. (Or equal, if CCS is applied - but that's not case) Wind is +14c/KWh (forgiving the fact that UK's 25% is not Germany's 18% - this would increase the subside needed by ~25%) Solar is +22c/KWh. The CCS technology is roughly a +3c/KWh, and reduces emissions by 70-90%. Wind is +14c/KWh, and reduces emissions by 100% (ideally, but still.) It's pretty evident that Wind/Solar technology is handily inferior to CCS technology. I do not claim the numbers to be completely correct, but wind's and solar's are pretty solidly based in reality, and underestimated. An argument could be made for reducing the Wind's number, for that many of these subsides were for building: Over 10% of building, while for purely substitution rate one would assume 3%. However, we have forgiven the fact that Germany's wind has a much lower uptime, and the land saturation factor. I do not assume those even each other, but i would reasonably assume the cost of the subsides would be unable to be reduced by over 80%. I'll ignore the "warmists" comments, since they are obviously wrong. In short, i would assume that by luck or anything, the guy has a reasonable chance of being correct. It doesn't take a genius to see that spending in subsides for wind/solar while building non-CCS'd COAL instead of CCS Gas is terrible.
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Sep 23, 2012 17:38
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Exactly, yeah. I thought my posting history in this and in the nuclear megathread would make that evident.
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Oct 25, 2012 12:13
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Quantum Mechanic posted:I'm having trouble seeing this. If you've got links to any discussion on this I'd appreciate it, because the best price I can see for nuclear plants is 9 billion AU for a 1.6 GW plant. The trick is that by using the extremely generous assumptions of the "plan", the cost of Nuclear is actually around 2b for GW. Or, by using real-world data for the "plan", it's cost roughly triples. It's one or the other, you can't use one set of assumptions for one plan and change them for the alternatives. This has been explored multiple times in this thread, i believe.
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Nov 14, 2012 03:15
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Quantum Mechanic posted:I thought this was due to the larger scale of construction for the plants proposed by the BZE plan? CST does well off economies of scale. And magically Nuclear does not? Same assumptions for all sources, or the comparison is invalid. That's the (biggest) point that hasn't been answered.
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Nov 14, 2012 23:12
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Quantum Mechanic posted:Yes, essentially. That, or different towers can be tuned to supply different loads to spread out the power generation, leading to less waste. It doesn't improve the maximum theoretical output (since there is a limit to how hot a single tower can get, dependent obviously on improved engineering techniques and salt mixtures) but it improves the average output. The Spain plants, however, are already divided in subplants. This wouldn't really make sense if further scale gains could be gained? e: Anyway, even if assumptions are correct, you cannot use real-world numbers for Nuclear and theoretical numbers for Solar. Either one, or the other. Then we can tweak, but the starting point has to be on equal conditions. Aureon fucked around with this message at 04:41 on Nov 15, 2012 |
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Nov 15, 2012 03:41
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quote:The Spain plants, however, are already divided in subplants. On page 52 of the BZE report: claims 80% load for Solar - does it ever, ever rain in Australia? The table doesn't really make any sense. quote:BZE report, page 53. Installations greater than 220 MW use multiple towers in parallel. I might be wrong about mirrors being used for more than one tower (that was something I heard at a BZE meeting) but multiple towers in parallel can diffuse the light from larger mirror fields more effective. On page 53, it goes to explain that it would split the whole thing, because any field bigger wouldn't have the tower receive a decent quantity of light. This is a case for smaller subplants (mirrors being nearer to towers) not the other way round. From there(And the appendix 3): quote:The 220 MW tower described by Sargent & Lundy with 17 hours of storage is approaching the optical limits of a single mirror field to reflect sunlight onto a single tower—at the outer heliostats the reflected light is too diffuse to heat the Page 54 provides us with a cost estimate: in 2012, the estimate is 8c/KWh. I am not aware of any CST plan running at less than the Spain ones, which run at 27c/KWh. Unless evidence can be provided for real-world running plants at around 8c/KWh, i'd say it's safe to discard those "estimates". The appendix 2 and 3 reiterate the same graphs, and the same points. Years have passed since those predictions, and they've been found wanting. Also, i would point out that the project requires a quantity of land that's bigger than the exclusion zone from Chernobyl. Substantially, having an exclusion zone of 20km around a Nuclear Plant with 4 reactors (producing 4GW) would use less land than the project requires for the 3.5GW of CST, by a substantial margin. (the 'circle' for solar would be over 65km) This may sit well with Australia, but wouldn't really with basically anywhere else in the world, except the Sahara perhaps. Hobo Erotica posted:Yeah fair point. Uranium/nuclear has its problems too of course, and my point was more to say that just cos it's got a high energy content doesn't mean it's immune to the problems of mining. I did say it's probably better than coal though. Lifted from the Nuclear thread: Office Thug posted:Would you rather mine and burn a tonne of coal that yields 24,000 megajoules + pollutants, or a tonne of rock that yields 620,000 to 980,000 megajoules of energy + a few grams of waste? When you can use the total 1.8 to 2.7 ppm of uranium and 6 to 9.6 ppm of thorium which are present in most rock, you start dealing with energy yields that completely surpass those of any other fuel or process, barring fusion. That 1 tonne of rock should also yield 1.5 to 2.5 grams of waste that needs to be isolated for 300 years, less if you take out the strontium-90 for use in RTGs and other things. quote:In other news, Greenpeace just released a global wind power outlook report. Main claim is that it could supply 12% of global energy demand by 2020. Again, have barely had time to skim it, but posting it here if anyone wants to go over it: They are the ones that claimed over 2m deaths from Chernobyl, who encouraged turning off Nuclear in Germany to replace it with Coal, and so on.
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Nov 15, 2012 14:06
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For a 20mw (12 net) plant, the Gemasolar had a 5mil subsidy and a 80m loan: That makes the cost a strict minimum of 85m. More uncertain sources put the cost at around 420m. (http://theenergycollective.com/nathan-wilson/58791/20mw-gemasolar-plant-elegant-pricey) That means 1gw is a 7-38b build cost. That's around five times nuclear, with lower running costs, but a much higher land use and a much shorter life. And random uncertainity. Five times fits the bill of the usual 27c/KWh. Combined cost average lowers from 33/W to 26/W, so that'd be "only" four times nuclear. Aureon fucked around with this message at 16:24 on Nov 15, 2012 |
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Nov 15, 2012 16:22
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Quantum Mechanic posted:Torresol put the financing cost at 260 million from what I can see, not 420. The 420 figure is from the Daily Mail, and frankly I wouldn't trust that tabloid rag to count its fingers twice and get the same answer. As you want to use: Either "Is building/planning" for both, or "has been done" for both. Make the comparison on even terms - That's what i've been saying. So, it's 3-4c for Nuclear and 12-22 for Solar, or 7-8c for Nuclear and 27-42 for Solar. Choose one type, and do not go "8 nuclear, since that's real world, but 12 solar, since we're planning that!" for the exact number: Yeah, i specified the source wasn't trusted. Please link were torresol puts their costs though, could be needed in the future.
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Nov 16, 2012 02:44
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