Spazzle posted:

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

AreWeDrunkYet posted:

Once again, you are completely failing to discount the costs involved. What's the point of tossing around a bunch of nominal dollar figures?

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.
Of course you're probably talking about the reactor going up in a mushroom cloud like a nuclear bomb, in which case the answer is no.

jfreder posted:

There aren't any literal explosions in an internal combustion engine but I understand the point you are making. Edit: unless you mean deflagration

Hobo Erotica posted:

Yes of course, and it'd be the same for wind or anything else, but after they're built I mean. 'Not having to keep on digging up the fuel' I suppose would be a more accurate way to describe it.

quote:

OAK RIDGE, Tenn., Aug. 21, 2012 — Fueling nuclear reactors with uranium harvested from the ocean could become more feasible because of a material developed by a team led by the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The combination of ORNL's high-capacity reusable adsorbents and a Florida company's high-surface-area polyethylene fibers creates a material that can rapidly, selectively and economically extract valuable and precious dissolved metals from water. The material, HiCap, vastly outperforms today's best adsorbents, which perform surface retention of solid or gas molecules, atoms or ions. HiCap also effectively removes toxic metals from water, according to results verified by researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

"We have shown that our adsorbents can extract five to seven times more uranium at uptake rates seven times faster than the world's best adsorbents," said Chris Janke, one of the inventors and a member of ORNL's Materials Science and Technology Division.

http://www.ornl.gov/info/press_releases/get_press_release.cfm?ReleaseNumber=mr20120821-00

Hobo Erotica posted:

Can someone tell me if that's what Kaal's link actually means? I get that it extracts 7 times as much 7 times as fast, but is that enough to be viable?

And once it starts happening at scale, would removing those quantities of uranimum have any affect on the functioning on the oceans?

quote:

The US wind industry is on track for a record-breaking year. In August, the American Wind Energy Association announced a milestone 50 GW of capacity and installations will this year beat previous records.

Matt Kaplan, US wind analyst at IHS Emerging Energy Research, estimates that 12 GW will be installed this year.

"We're expecting that 2012 will be the largest year for wind installations in the US," he said.

But the banner year for America's wind industry will be followed by a dramatic collapse in rates of installation that could sink as low as 2 GW or less, said Kaplan.

"We've seen a bit of jobs losses and manufacturing lines going down so far, but we do expect that to continue. We've also seen a couple of wind project development companies cut staff as well."

The Production Tax Credit first introduced in 1992 has helped the US reach 50GW of installed capacity. But the 2.2 cent per kilowatt hour federal subsidy is due to expire at the end of this year unless Congress agrees to extend it. When the PTC expired three times previously, installation rates crashed by up to 94%.

GulMadred posted:

Arghy posted:

I most just want to be able to explain just what happens in confidence since even i'm still hazy about what exactly emits radiation in places like fukushima. I atleast try to avoid talking out my rear end constantly and openly admit things i dont know.

Why is the water radioactive for example? they say their releasing tons of contaminated water but i dont know why that water is contaminated--did the core breach releasing fission products or is it stuff from the spent fuel rods? Just what exactly is a fission byproduct? i watched those 10 hour long lectures and i still cant say with confidence just what exactly is emitting radiation in the water. I was under the assumption that it was cesium and another element which was emitting radiation which was the byproduct of the fissioning spent fuel rods.

Any idiot can realize that any contaminated water is getting diluted to hell and poses no threat but just why the water is radioactive in the first place is a good question.

The Atlantic posted:

This makeshift cooling system is a conceptually simple cycle. Water is constantly pumped to the stricken reactor vessels containing the damaged fuel. Because the integrity of internal various containment units was compromised, the water not only becomes contaminated by its pass over the damaged core but also finds its way into the buildings’ basements. The water is then pumped back out of the building, processed, and pumped through the building again.

In practice, however, the system is not a neat, closed cycle; and it is here that major problems begin to appear. The entire site bristles with conduits, tunnels, and trenches, which, unfortunately, allow some of the untainted groundwater on its way to the sea to leak into these basements. This net inflow of about 400 tons of water per day, amounting to the carrying capacity of about 13 large gasoline trucks, adds continuously to the volume of contaminated water that must be processed and contained. The solution so far has been to keep building more storage tanks and reservoirs on site.

Uphill of the stricken reactors is land covered with almost 1,000 of these water storage units. After two and a half years, they already hold enough water to fill 120 Olympic-size swimming pools, and their burden continues to grow. This colossal effort is unsustainable. Not surprisingly, leaks have begun to appear.

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/10/how-fukushima-is-contaminating-more-water/280671/

Hobo Erotica posted:

Here are some of the points raised which you might be able to address:

Neurotic Nurse posted:

Well, I suppose that you're at least honest about your source, a conversation, which I cant verify, so I'm prepared to call it bullshit. Anecdotal yep, but my party branch as exactly zero scientists in it, three physicians, four registered nurses, and an enrolled nurse.

blowfish posted:

Problem: you need like 3-4 times overcapacity at least to get reasonably secure base load power, and you need to add storage to do that. That's going to increase wind/solar costs quite a bit if they are to be the backbone of your power grid.

blowfish posted:

However (looking at it from a "we'd like to avoid the worst of climate change" perspective) we need to be done in 50 years, not just so far along that intermittent power generation starts to matter.

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?

Baronjutter posted:

Imagine how loving cheap nuclear would be if all the political red-tape in the regulations were eliminated and we just had a few mass-produced standard designs...

Trabisnikof posted:

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

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

Trabisnikof posted:

It is including the capacity factor. It doesn't include unplanned intermittency, which yes is more of an issue with Wind than Nuclear but is actually an issue for both.


Edit: The EIA's caveat is yes, no one is deciding between building a nuclear plant or a wind farm.

EIA 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. The capacity factors shown for solar, wind, and hydroelectric resources in Table 1 are simple averages of the capacity factor for the marginal site in each region. These capacity factors can vary significantly by region and can represent resources that may or may not get built in EIA capacity projections. These capacity factors should not be interpreted as representing EIA's estimate or projection of the gross generating potential of resources actually projected to be built.

Trabisnikof posted:

Couple that with the reality that nuclear is consistent and inflexible. Nuclear plants (and coal) can't shut down in the middle of the night and then power back up for the day. In a grid with a lot of nuclear, it becomes less cost effective for renewables to operate.

Trabisnikof posted:

This is sum of irony of this thread wrapped up in a little package. People pretending to care about energy, the environment, or society. Its not about science, economics or even logic. Because really, its all just about feelings and identities wrapped up in polices. Just like the "hippies" and "environmentalists" you so openly mock.

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.

Pander posted:

The primary problem is that they essentially need what today would be considered magic to make fusion work as an energy producer. Cheap heat isn't the problem, it's cheap pressure to confine the fuel. The entire premise of fusion is recreating the sun, and we simply can't create the gravity well required to keep a fusion reaction self-sustaining like fission reactions are. Calling fusion a physics problem is calling the ability for humans to flap their arms and fly a biology problem.

amanasleep posted:

I think this is true of main line Tokamak/NIF/ITER efforts. They have huge funding and poor results over decades of work. Of the alternative approaches, almost none have any significant funding (many for good reason). Still, I think it's a bit much to claim that fusion research is a waste of resources compared to expenditures on other energy solutions. Fusion power in general is not a part of the public imagination, so I don't think there is any danger that somehow people are going to get sidetracked from whatever priorities you think they should have.

To be clear, I am not opposed to nuclear research and power development in a properly regulated environment. But I think a few fusion approaches have merit and I am convinced that there is nothing theoretically infeasible about fusion power development within the same time horizon of other alternative energy proposals.

Hedera Helix posted:

Could someone who knows more about nuclear power plants explain the logistics of this, because this does not sound like a good idea

Ardennes posted:

Someone dismissing green technologies one by one is probably anti-green.

Ardennes posted:

That said, since SA has gone pretty right-wing, a lot of threads have.

Sheikh Djibouti posted:

If I may, I have a technical (or perhaps production related) question. Back in the early 90s, there was talk about, and development of, thin film silicon photovoltaic technologies, with the notion that transparent or semitransparent photovoltaic films could be used in building integrated applications, for example coatings on exterior glass surfaces. The technology still appears to be around, but I can't seem to find anything on why it isn't more widespread. Problems with efficiencies? Photodegradation? Not commercially viable at current production volumes based on energy yield?

Hobo Erotica posted:

Oh man, that's actually a pretty good idea.

Hobo Erotica posted:

One planet, brother.

Literally I mean. As in, if Germany is trying to lower the carbone pollution produced by their energy generation for its effect on the global climate, that money would perform much better in India.

For the local particulate emissions, yeah ok maybe they should keep it in Germany.

QuarkJets posted:

Yeah, golf courses are pretty atrocious when it comes to water conservation. It's kind of insane that California is still allowing so many golf courses to keep consuming so much water, despite long-standing drought conditions

Baronjutter posted:

I think the rate of stomachs in Japan is still about 100 per capita.

Nintendo Kid posted:

It would probably also require razing whole forests and using up an assload of cropland, if we started using it for any significant fraction of coal's current usage. The much smaller populations of Europe centuries ago before coal really boomed faced impending lack of wood and crops to burn for energy before coal became practical. And that was with way smaller energy requirements.

Nintendo Kid posted:

Yes, but coal isn't being used for that, so you wouldn't be replacing the few remaining coal burning household heaters in the country, you'd be replacing actual coal electrical plants that need sometimes hundreds of tons of coal a day. It's orders of magnitude bigger impact than heating a bunch of hippie/farmer cabins that only need the heat a few months a year

Nintendo Kid posted:

It's a very small number that have wood fireplaces and pellet stoves that can adequately heat the house, especially with the move to fireplaces as means of decoration starting in the 50s or so. Unless you're talking about retrofitting houses with normal central heat systems that currently run off electricity, oil, or gas?

The vast majority of housing stock out there is either natural gas (about half) or electric (somewhere around 35-40%. Functional fireplaces for whole-home heating are very rare in practice, and pellet burners or other solid fuel furnaces are quite rare.

Nintendo Kid posted:

So they're already using it as a source of heat and therefore they're not going to use less coal by continuing to use the wood. I'm not getting what you're trying to propose, they sure haven't been burning coal in those systems for quite some time. Also it's the "fastest growing method" because it started from very little recent usage.

blowfish posted:

And what Trabisnikof said. If it's from waste, it obviously doesn't come with as much extra environmental damage. Are there estimates of how much of the country we can run on waste wood chips and landfill methane? I bet it's enough to be economically interesting, but not enough to actually sustain an all renewable grid.