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Aureon posted:Subsides are a solution in the micro, but change absolutely nothing in the macro. Sure they do. Subsidizing costs for early adopters increases production, which should lead to increased economies of scale for producers, spending on R&D, etc. The long run result should be a faster decrease in price than without the subsidy.
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Sep 6, 2012 15:19
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Install Gentoo posted:Let's say you have an average 40 watt incandescent bulb you want to replace - it costs $1.25 for the bulb and runs for 1,000 hours. At 8 hours a day, 50,000 hours is 17 years. You completely forgot to discount the projected period, which brings the price of bulbs plus electricity for the CFL and LED to very similar levels. On top of that, there's the risk of your lighting needs changing over 17 years - it's a very long period to lock yourself into a certain type of light bulb in most situations for most people. Don't get me wrong, LEDs are cool and hopefully will drop in price enough to make them the default choice sooner rather than later, but it's probably not the right economic decision for most people at the moment.
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Sep 13, 2012 12:32
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Install Gentoo posted:Yes, LED bulbs last an EXTREMELY long time. I hardly see how that would make the overall price match CFLs though, as CFLs can't get much lower in power usage per light output at all. Also I don't see what you mean by "lighting needs changing in 17 years" - at worst you just move the bulb to another fixture if at year 9 you decide you want 60-watt-equivalent out of the lamp you had the 40-watt-equivalent LED bulb in. How many times have you moved in the past 17 years, and did you take all your light bulbs with you each time? Can you be sure that the fixtures you have in your home (or the new one you move to) will require the same mix of bulbs of various wattages over such a long period? Have you ever broken a light bulb? For a commercial or industrial installation a lot of these factors are mitigated, but there's just too much variability in the lighting in an apartment or house to comfortably make projections that far out. If you want to use less electricity, all the more power to you, but a lot of the assumptions don't hold up if you're making a purely economic decision. Install Gentoo posted:Let's go back to my example of bulbs: Once again, you are completely failing to discount the costs involved. What's the point of tossing around a bunch of nominal dollar figures?
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Sep 13, 2012 17:52
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Kaal posted:I don't quite follow you. Could you please generate an example of the correct accounting of the figures? That depends entirely on the rate you choose for yourself, but let's take a 5% real discount rate for shits and giggles (a lower rate favors the LED more, a higher one the CFL). We'll go out 20,000 hours and 50,000 hours, which are the two comparisons he's done. At 50k hours at the national average price of $.1212, the nominal amounts (which he posted correctly in the first comparison post) would be $101.66 for the CFL and $59.36 for the LED, so the CFL option costs 71% more. Discounted, that comes out to $72.91 for the CFL vs $48.43 for the LED, or 51% more. At 20k hours, the second comparison done, the nominal amounts are $40.66 vs $37.54, the CFL is 8% more expensive. Discounted, it's $36.33 vs $35.70, the CFL is only 2% more expensive. What it comes down to is that the LED has higher up front costs that have to be paid in today's dollars, while the CFL option has recurring bulb costs that can be paid in future dollars. If you have any outstanding credit card or student loan debt, it's probably silly to buy LEDs over CFLs. If you only a have mortgage and your preferred investments are bonds, the LEDs look a lot more attractive. For a REIT, it depends on their cost of capital, but that's probably north of 10% in most cases. And of course, living in an area with higher electricity costs favors the LED. There are a bunch of less tangible possibilities we can't predict: -Electricity prices go up faster than inflation (favors LED) -CFL prices drop as tech improves (favors CFL) -Circumstances that prevent the full 50k years of LED usage - moving, dropping a bulb, etc (favors CFL) There a ton more if you think about it for any length of time, those just immediately come to mind. AreWeDrunkYet fucked around with this message at 18:37 on Sep 13, 2012 |
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Sep 13, 2012 18:35
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Rent-A-Cop posted:If you give me $100 now I will give you $101 (adjusted for inflation) on your 80th birthday. What a great deal for you! Maybe you should take your misguided, five year old arguments elsewhere? CFLs are a clearly superior choice to incandescents today with payback periods measured in months, and the same will probably be true of LEDs by the end of the decade.
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Sep 13, 2012 19:30
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QuarkJets posted:Someone suggested to me that the oil shale in Wyoming and its neighbor states is the best route for US energy independence. Now I am already aware that using oil shale is very expensive, but is it cheaper to use oil shale to power gasoline vehicles or nuclear power to power electric vehicles? Long run, nuclear and electric should ideally win out - it's an industry begging for nationalization to offer the kind of economy of scale that only a government can muster, building multiple plants to common specifications and centralizing much of the (necessary) regulatory hurdles involved. It's exactly the kind of project that's perfectly suited to the economic situation (cheap borrowing rates, no risk of crowding out private investment) and would create all sorts of bonuses (jobs, cheap energy, reduction in greenhouse gasses, energy independence). Realistically, given the political climate, expect to see continued inaction on energy policy and more reliance on whatever is cheapest short-term. If it's cheaper to drill in Wyoming than it is in Saudi Arabia, there might be an increase in energy independence as defined as the percentage of energy created domestically, but any gains will just fall to the oil industry while the price you pay at the pump will be dictated by Asian demand and anxiety about the Straights of Hormuz no matter how much we drill at home.
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Oct 26, 2012 00:30
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Hobo Erotica posted:Electric cars get way too much hype. They sound good at first glance, but when you think about it, they don’t actually accomplish very much by way of solving problems at all. Imagine if we somehow instantly changed every car in the world to an electric motor. You’ve still got traffic, you’ve still got parking shortages, you've still got people not getting fit, and unless you’re getting your electricity renewably, (which in most Australian cities isn’t the case), you’re still burning fossil fuels, with an emissions intensity which as bad or worse than petrol or diesel, let alone LPG. Centralized generation is much more efficient and makes it easier to scrub pollution other than co2. If every oil car had to be powered by a battery and an oil power plant, the efficiency gains from having a small number of large generators outweighs transmission losses. It's less obvious with coal in terms of ghg and pollution, but most (Western) countries these days carry a fair mix of coal, gas, and renewables so it's not as simple as assuming that every mwh used to charge an electric car is generated by coal. All the other issues that come with cars are still there, yes, but this is the energy megathread. Urban planning is somewhere down the hall.
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Nov 21, 2012 04:41
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Hobo Erotica posted:My understanding is it's too far off to be taken seriously at this stage, and I don't know much more about it, but if really works, then sure why not. It's perfectly feasible once uranium mining is regulated into the ground (rightfully so - it is a dirty business).
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Dec 6, 2012 03:55
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Kaal posted:The classic issue with recovering uranium from the sea water is finding an efficient method of doing so. They basically do it by setting up a uranium filter, and then running thousands of gallons of water through it. It's workable, particularly because fuel costs are such a small part of nuclear reactor overhead, but the method is inefficient and fairly time and cost prohibitive compared to simply mining it ($300/kg versus $150/kg). These scientists have found a filter that is 5-7 times more effective, which should decrease costs and water usage similarly. If the technology proves out, mining uranium could quickly be made obsolete. The other side of this is that fuel costs are such a vanishingly small part of the total costs involved with a nuke plant that even doubling the costs involved to avoid the kind of environmental impact caused by uranium mining is barely relevant to the feasibility of the project as a whole. To be more specific, uranium makes up 13% of the operating costs of a nuclear power plant (http://www.nei.org/resourcesandstats/documentlibrary/reliableandaffordableenergy/graphicsandcharts/fuelaspercentelectricproductioncosts/), and the capital costs for any new project being considered far outpace any operating costs anyway. The cost of uranium isn't essential to the economics of nuclear power generation like the cost of fuel is to fossil fuel power generation. AreWeDrunkYet fucked around with this message at 15:29 on Dec 6, 2012 |
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Dec 6, 2012 15:24
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Pander posted:True, but the point of the argument here is to sway Hobo Erotica, who had in the thread resisted nuclear in no small part due to the effects of uranium mining in Australia on both the environment and local peoples. Mining presented a large moral concern that led to a general nuclear roadblock to him. I agree with that totally, my point was that nuclear power is not reliant on the (relatively) cheap cost of uranium mining, and even without the hypothetical down the road advances in seawater extraction noted in the article, the industry could switch over to the current seawater extraction methods without raising prices too significantly. Some regulatory pressure could eliminate uranium mining over time, and this does not have to prevent increased reliance on nuclear power for the purposes of reducing carbon dioxide emissions - that's the point I'm trying to make to Hobo Erotica.
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Dec 6, 2012 15:49
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Lamdo posted:Man... No esta bien. How the gently caress is this problem so complicated... There is so much going on here that trying to orchestrate a goddamned thing with actual individual personal interests is just hosed. I guess we'll burn coal. Might make my climate up here better... We could simplify things and just nationalize energy production and distribution, but of course that's just crazy talk as far as anyone who could make that kind of decision is concerned.
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Jan 25, 2013 14:37
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Charlz Guybon posted:Citigroup has released an 85 page report projecting that US will achieve energy indepence (with the exception of canada) within 5 years. What's the difference? All the major US extractors are privately owned and we charge practically no taxes on extraction. The lower prices are much less a function of independence and more of global supply vs demand, especially as liquefaction takes off. There's no particular benefit to the US from energy "independence", all the gains are pretty much all going to a handful of companies and their heavily concentrated and international owners.
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Feb 13, 2013 13:03
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Dengue_Fever posted:This is wild speculation, but perhaps the military resources and budget will be diverted to building emergency power plants when oil and coal really starts to dwindle. That isn't a risk in the foreseeable future. The US has for all intents and purposes limitless coal reserves, a shitload of gas, and plenty of oil if we're willing to give a little on extraction costs. Prices may go up, but that's about it. Burning all that stuff will ruin the environment before it runs out.
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Feb 27, 2013 15:49
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Dengue_Fever posted:I agree that it'll ruin the environment before it runs out, but it will run out, the sticky question is how fast? I'm not going to claim that current estimates are entirely accurate, but you're thinking too far into the future. Current estimates of recoverable reserves don't matter much beyond a generation or so, mining technology specifically and energy technology generally will have completely changed by then. For example, coal accessible with mountaintop removal probably wasn't being counted in the 1950s, and energy extractors are drilling underwater today at depths that they probably couldn't even explore 20 years ago. Think about all the production today from shale oil and fracking. For the forecastable (read: short-term) future, there is enough in the ground. Too much, really, when you look at the rate of climate change. Not to mention, it's not like a mine or well just goes from producing normally to empty, there are diminishing returns. If/when currently recoverable reserves start to near their end, prices will go up and more will be economically accessible - when oil prices shot up, a ton of "empty" wells suddenly started producing again with new (and more expensive) techniques that weren't economical before.
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Feb 27, 2013 17:34
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hobbesmaster posted:And it's only got a 3500 acre footprint. Which means the Mojave could fit nearly 9,000 of them, 3 times the existing power generation in the US. There's space. If* the costs can be brought down to be in line with other sources of generation, there's nothing wrong with solar thermal. It's not a reason to exclude nuclear, but why is the space thing such a big issue? Is the water usage that high compared to nuclear? *Big if, yes.
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Sep 27, 2013 02:07
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Obviously nobody is going to put three times the power generation already in place in the entire country in one place - the point is that even though it is relatively space intensive, it could be expanded to provide power for everyone in that region and still only take a fraction of the available space if the price can be brought down. Animal habitats and other local environmental concerns should be heeded as much as possible, and carbon emissions are negligible after construction.
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Sep 27, 2013 02:18
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JohnGalt posted:It really depends on the state (when we are talking about the US). States like Ohio really dont give a drat about a lot of things and you have some leeway. In PA you can get a fine for spilling freshwater on the ground. Unfortunately, enforcement is all too often sporadic and inconsequential beyond fines that can be folded into the cost of doing business. Put some personal liability into it and come around more than a couple of times a year, you'll see some change. JohnGalt posted:My experience with solar has been terrible so far. I know it can work under the right conditions (where it is sunny all of the time) but it has technical shortcomings. The way in which the cells are set up in series is sort of an Achilles heel where a cell being covered in a quarter sized splatter of birdshit can cut the output of a 5ftx3ft panel by 30%. A century ago, a gas turbine was likely a finicky and dirty machine that was barely more than a proof of concept. There are some very fundamental limitations to solar power, but you just pointed out a relatively simple engineering hurdle that will be ironed out (along with many others) in due course.
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Sep 29, 2013 21:45
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Anosmoman posted:I think there's generally a bit odd perspective on green technologies - often it seems like an attempt to pursue the second worst option. Like growing food ecologically with the trade off that we'll need more land and water to do it. It may or may not be better than spraying pesticides all over the place but farmland isn't good for ecosystems or the climate and it's not "natural" in any way. When I look at my country it's forrests as far you could see cut down and turned into farmland. Growing food ecologically might be a bit less bad - but still pretty bad. We shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking we're doing the planet any favors because we are still the problem. Land use for power generation, even large scale solar, is mostly a local issue. Agriculture in the US is something like 500 million acres, even the current solar thermal tech could power the entire US with a million or so. This is not to discount local land use issues, but it's not a broad environmental issue in the same way that carbon emissions are. I think we can all (generally) agree nuclear is the best option. It's pretty much ideal for how we use power currently, and it's mainly lovely politics that prevents all of the developed world from powering itself like France. But hey, those lovely politics are there, so it's definitely nice to see that there are non-nuclear alternatives approaching feasibility compared to fossil fuels. It's not about pursuing the second worst option, it's about not letting perfect be the enemy of good.
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Oct 4, 2013 12:42
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Quantum Mechanic posted:I'm happy to admit nuclear has a somewhat undeserved bum rap but I'm not going to pretend it's perfectly clean, safe and reliable, especially when we're now seeing a massive (and poorly-run) cleanup operation in Japan and god knows what we're going to do about the spill in Kakadu. Of course that's only brown people's land, so that gets written off as an externality. Nuclear power is relatively safe and clean as long as it's properly overseen, controlled and regulated. If the phrase "Clive Palmer, nuclear power plant operator" doesn't terrify you, maybe it should. That's also ignoring uranium mining, which I've only ever seen handwaved away with seawater extraction. Meanwhile, the work of scientists and engineers on various renewable energy reports like the UMelbourne Energy Institute and the AEMO apparently doesn't count as science because everybody knows renewables could never work. I think this is a misinterpretation of thread opinion, or whatever you want to call it. Nuclear isn't an alternative to renewable power sources because there is just so little renewable generation to replace in the first place, and that can only grow so quickly as the technology comes along. Nuclear, on the other hand, is ready to replace baseline generation from coal/gas now. The technology is more than mature enough to make it happen practically overnight (especially compared to the timelines for renewables) if the political will materialized. And the truth is that a lot of the shortcomings of nuclear can be handwaved away when compared to burning hydrocarbons because of just how lovely an option that is. Uranium mining could be an order of magnitude more toxic than it is, it would still an improvement over coal mining and oil/gas extraction simply because of the scales involved. And between the CO2 emissions and particulate pollution, we could probably have a major meltdown a couple times a year, dump the waste into the ocean, and still come out ahead with nuclear compared to the alternatives.
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Dec 12, 2013 01:08
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Trabisnikof posted:There's a huge difference between the turbines from the 70s on steel derricks and modern turbines. Plus, I was also kinda pointing out the laziness that often people just go to the old wind farm that is really close to San Francisco rather than a wind farm constructed this decade. I'm surprised they haven't been torn down by whoever owns them, that much unused steel in one place has to be worth something.
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Jan 10, 2014 20:50
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Jeffrey posted:Fuel prices themselves already serve as a deterrent to driving more miles though. You are correct that fuel taxes are more of one, but they disproportionately tax low income people relative to how much driving they do. I'd be fine with ending fuel subsidies for drivers filling up at the pump as long as the cost savings were used to provide gas vouchers for low income people who are again disproportionately affected, but I don't think a fuel tax is a very good way to fund highways in general. Why not just approach it as a revenue neutral device? There are obvious efficiency benefits to taxing fuel, and the regressive parts of it can be offset by adjusting income taxes in a progressive way. So the multi-millionaire who travels everywhere by private jet probably sees his tax burden goes up, the lower income person who drives his F-150 100 miles each day may or may not see a difference in tax burden, but a lower income person who drives a small car or uses public transport would see his tax burden go down. Tax policy is a legitimate and effective tool for influencing behavior, let's not throw that out so easily.
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Jan 11, 2014 14:59
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silence_kit posted:The reason why there is the idea to integrate photovoltaics into other installed portions of buildings has to do with the cost of installing the solar cells. I have been told that the installation cost is the dominant cost for most solar energy generating systems built from crystalline silicon solar cells, the dominant photovoltaic technology. If you could put the solar panels into the windows and shingles on the roof, you sort of aren't paying for the installation cost, since those would be put in when the new house or building is built or during its natural cycle of being remodeled. But isn't this going to be more expensive to build and maintain than just installing a bunch of dedicated solar panels a few miles away? It's a clever enough idea, but it seems to make more sense to concentrate on applications where energy generation isn't some ancillary consideration.
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Jul 14, 2014 12:43
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Trabisnikof posted:This thread is pretty much the Bechtel Home for Old Nuke Believers. It doesn't matter the topic, we're always three posts away from "if only everything was nuclear". Don't forget you're in D&D. It's not the Bechtel Home for Old Nuke Believers, it's the TVA Home for Old Nuke Believers around here.
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Oct 23, 2014 20:46
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ANIME AKBAR posted:One neat idea that's been brought up is to rely on a huge fleet of electric vehicles as a grid storage mechanism. So long as an EV is plugged into a charging station, it can exchange energy with the grid in both directions, and has basically no limits on response times. They estimated that if you had half a million EVs (along with a very sophisticated control) you could basically flatline power generation during the min and max demand hours. The downside of course is that you'd need half a million EVs, and using the EVs as grid storage would likely kill their battery life. I wonder if utilities could make deals with data centers, hospitals, or anyone else who has (or could benefit from) a bunch of large UPSs sitting around to provide discounted power in exchange from drawing from those batteries at peak. Or is the scale too small to be comparable to a fleet of electric cars? e: Interesting, it seems like data centers already use their UPSs to reduce the amount of peak power they draw to save on costs. Same benefit, and a lot less complex to manage. http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en/us/pubs/archive/39964.pdf AreWeDrunkYet fucked around with this message at 14:29 on Oct 24, 2014 |
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Oct 24, 2014 14:25
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Building a new nuclear plant on land gets people all NIMBYish, but no one seems to mind that the Navy is still building reactors on a regular basis. Couldn't they take some of their existing reactor designs and put a bunch of them on barges off the coast to provide power? Stick five of the reactors the Nimitzes use on there, and you've basically got the output of a standard US nuclear plant.
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Oct 24, 2014 16:02
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I understand that floating naval reactors are clearly less efficient than civilian land-based options while presenting other difficulties, but public discourse just seems less toxic when it comes to military-based socialism. Build them under the pretense of trusting the patriots of the armed forces to provide security against the terror threat to the existing power infrastructure, whatever works. How much less efficient is it though? Is there any way to estimate a cost per megawatt hour, or is military accounting too opaque?
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Oct 24, 2014 16:47
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Pander posted:Regarding efficiency: I think typical ship reactors are on the scale of about 20-30 MWe. It would take about 30-50 ships to replace one typical land nuclear power plant. Most of these ships cost on the order of billions. So the cost would be at LEAST a factor of 5 higher, and probably closer to 10 to 20. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A4W_reactor Is MWth a substantially different measurement than MWe? 550 each is well on the way to industrial scale generation. I would also assume that a lot of those costs come from making it a functioning warship that could be skimped on if power is the focus. Hate to keep relying on Wikipedia, but from here- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watts_Bar_Nuclear_Generating_Station It looks like getting 1 GW of modern nuclear generation costs about $4-4.5b. The George H.W. Bush, with similar generation capacity, came in at $6.2b. Strip off the runways, guns, lodging for 5000 people, etc, etc, and I don't see why the cost wouldn't be competitive.
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Oct 24, 2014 17:05
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Sinestro posted:MWe = MWth * thermal-to-electrical efficiency, Considering that that's about 30% with current turbines, I'd say that's rather a big difference. Phanatic posted:MWth = megawatts, thermal. The plant makes that much heat. We don't care about heat except insofar as we need to cool the plant. What comes out, MWe, megawatts electrical, is what matters. The point of a naval reactor is to generate steam to turn a turbine to turn reduction gears to turn a shaft to turn a prop to make the ship go, the electricity is almost incidental. The Nimitz's electrical generation capacity is around 60-70 MWe, in line with the earlier figures per reactor. Pander posted:Yes MWth is different than MWe. MWth dumps about 2/3 of its MW as waste heat. So it produces around (let's be charitable) 200 MWe. So you'd need about 3 of those ships to match a standard nuclear power plant (about 1200GWe). Thanks, that helps clarify things. AreWeDrunkYet posted:e: Interesting, it seems like data centers already use their UPSs to reduce the amount of peak power they draw to save on costs. Same benefit, and a lot less complex to manage. To what extent can power-shifting like this make renewables more viable? Even expanding on the idea to residential, the same people who may not be interested in having a utility draw power from their electric car battery when there is too much grid demand may be willing to offset some of their personal peak (expensive) consumption by drawing from that same battery. Personalizing it may remove some selfishness from the equation, as well as make it easier to do the math if the cost savings justify the additional wear and tear to the battery.
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Oct 24, 2014 18:31
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Nintendo Kid posted:Why bother with a PR campaign? Just build reactors on the property of large military bases, where most of the surrounding population doesn't exactly have a say against it. Oops, I guess we inadvertently overbuilt generation by a couple orders of magnitude on this military base. Might as well push it out to the civilian grid.
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Nov 1, 2014 00:32
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Trabisnikof posted:I've yet to be convinced that wave power will ever be economic and meet environmental standards at the same time. It's a shame maintaining industrial equipment underwater is such a challenge, it seems so elegant to install some turbines in an ocean current. Seems at least part of the problem is that most companies are just taking metal ground based designs and dealing with the higher costs of working and constant corrosion in the ocean. If there is less structural support required in the water, wouldn't there be potential in approaching the challenge with lighter materials that don't inherently dissolve in salt water?
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Nov 24, 2014 12:53
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Pander posted:Not much is robust enough to survive hailstorms. Drove through Blair Nebraska recently when I visited a nearby nuke plant, the entire town had to replace siding, roofs, and windows due to a massive hailstorm a year prior. Perhaps more relevant, it doesn't sound like the nuclear plant was damaged.
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Dec 30, 2014 19:49
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Pander posted:Isn't that true of everything, like fission products? Scale matters. Uranium mining and fission byproducts are ridiculously dirty, but you need a whole lot less of it - for example, the world mines something like 60,000 tons of uranium compared to 8,000,000,000 tons of coal. Coal is obviously terrible, but even the industrial processes to create enough PV to make a significant dent in world energy production would create far more pollution and have a much greater impact than mining, enriching, and disposing of enough nuclear fuel for a similar amount of electricity.
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Aug 4, 2015 15:41
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Trabisnikof posted:Do you have some data to back this up? It's admittedly speculative, but again it comes back to scale. A nuclear plant with a couple of reactors can produce a couple GW in a relatively compact structure. I would expect the foundations and mountings, plus the materials for the panels themselves, for the fields of PV panels necessary to generate that much electricity would require significantly more materials. Though it would be good to see data - is anyone aware of comparisons of the amount of building materials involved for different power sources?
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Aug 6, 2015 19:17
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Anosmoman posted:These guys do some calculations but I don't know how accurate or useful it is. Keep in mind you can run the calculations for suburban vs urban living and get similarly hugely different numbers in land/energy/material use - and people wouldn't care at all. It's all very true but you're not going to convince anyone with it. In any event the US government is not fighting against nuclear - it's actively supporting it. The problem isn't policy, it's risk averse investors. Why support it with stuff like loan subsidies when the government could simply build the reactors and sell the energy? Sounds like a good retirement path for nuclear submarine engineers. We can borrow money for effectively no cost given current real rates on government bonds, I can't legitimately see a good reason not to do this.
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Aug 7, 2015 00:22
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fermun posted:Polycrystalline silicon solar panels suffer degradation of roughly 0.6% efficiency loss annually. They tend to be warrantied for 25 years with a lifespan of about 35 years, where lifespan is defined as 99% of panels are still operating at above 70% original efficiency. 25 years doesn't sound like very long for power generation. And it's really not even 25 years if they are significantly degraded by that time. Nuclear plants from the 60s are still humming along (presumably at or near their original capacity), and there are operational coal plants 20 years older than that which will likely only be retired for regulatory reasons. Having to effectively rebuild your entire generating capacity every generation seems like an awful waste of resources.
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Nov 19, 2015 16:48
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OwlFancier posted:Like I said, that's why it's exactly the sort of thing that should be nationally financed. It may not be economically competitive right this moment but it is an arguably necessary long term infrastructure investment, as well as being something that should become more economically viable the more it is pursued, and as fossil fuels become more scarce/environmentally nonviable. It really shouldn't be that complicated. Just have the government (with its access to more or less zero interest rate borrowing) build plants wherever there is demand, and sell the electricity at cost or with slight margins. If private producers of energy can do it a lower cost, go for it. If not, too bad. No net government spending (because the energy is being sold), cheap energy, fighting global warming, and a retirement program for submarine engineers - what more could you ask for?
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Nov 20, 2015 20:21
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Anosmoman posted:It's not cheap and that's the problem. It's mostly capital costs, which are exacerbated for private industry because of financing costs. The government can borrow money for (just about) free, and amortize those capital costs over the life of the plant.
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Nov 20, 2015 20:25
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Trabisnikof posted:The real issue isn't the costs, its the capital risk. Which is represented by financing costs, something the government is able to circumvent entirely.
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Nov 20, 2015 22:16
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Trabisnikof posted:You're correct, the U.S. Government would be able to eat the costs of shutting down a nuclear plant early without a problem. That's the thing though, private entities typically finance individual plants to limit the impact of a project going bust. So the risks of that individual plant failing have to be priced into the cost of capital, even the market cost of which would drop considerably if that risk was spread across the entire nuclear industry. The government backstop of a nationalized nuclear industry would certainly drop the costs further, and granted, that would effectively be shouldering the risk on taxpayers. That said, a broad expansion of nuclear power would just about eliminate the carbon footprint of US power generation - a nearly 40% drop in CO2 emissions. On top of that, all of the particulate pollution and other fun stuff spewed out by coal and gas plants would be replaced by waste sealed in casks and nice, clean steam. I would argue that those social benefits would far outweigh the cost of subsidizing the risk of a nationalized nuclear industry.
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Nov 20, 2015 23:01
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Phanatic posted:So in that regard, most of the arguments against the feasibility of solar roadways also apply here. When your embedded sensor breaks, how do you go about replacing it? Take the road out of service, jackhammer/mill out that section and refill? As opposed to just popping out your broken flush-mounted sensor and dropping in another one? The vast, vast majority of roads have plenty of space around them. All of these solar roadway ideas are absurd when you consider that you could just put solar cells next to the road and get all of the benefit with none of the wear and tear.
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Dec 24, 2015 20:45
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