getting it right is expensive and needs much more rigorous independent risk management than we have"Getting it right" can't happen within the socioeconomic frameworks we have available in this world today.
So yeah...I KNOW there is a damn safe way to run a nuclear power plant. But the businessmen who are motivated by low costs and high returns don't really give a shit about that.Easy solution: Nationalized power companies. Less easy, more palatable solution: Proper oversight.
parking an outdated reactor on the edge of the sea in an earthquake area with inadequate regulatory oversight is not doing it right. -- DevonianFirst of all, it would have been a lot worse had it not been next to the sea, don't you think? Their ability to use sea water to cool it down helped, which was part of the plan. You're not going to find large tracts of uninhabited land in Japan. Nor are you going to find land that's not going to get earthquakes. It also wasn't near sea level at all, the Tsunami was enormous.
Disappointing. They'll be switching from statistically proven less deadly sources of energy to more deadly ones.-- shiiHow many other forms of power have the potential to make huge areas uninhabitable?
1. We can have our ipad...and nuclear powerWhat is this crap about the iPad that always gets thrown around by people talking about energy? You're talking about something that can (supposedly) run for 10 hours on a charge. Things like computers and the internet use far, far less energy then stuff like air conditioners and cars.
2. We can have our ipad...and we use fossil fuels.
3. We don't use nuclear power and we don't use fossil fuels...but we don't have our ipads. -- hal_c_on
It's frustrating that the nuclear energy approach is being framed as "70s nuclear technology OR renewables!" The mere idea that people are even considering ABANDONING nuclear power in ALL FORMS is infuriating. The Fukushima plant, like many reactors operating today, were built and are based of off technology from the 1970s. -- disillusionedIt was new when they put it in. I mean, 30 years from now there could be another disaster and people could say "I can't believe people want to give up on nuclear power when the plants with the problems are ones that were designed in the 2010s!" Everything old was new once.
But simply saying "we can't figure this out, let's quit now" is just absurd. -- disillusionedNo, it's actually pretty reasonable. People should not be engaging in 'experiments' with an unknown risk of catastrophic, or even locally apocalyptic failure
I don't believe that. If there is any nation in the world that has the tech, the industrial base, the regulatory framework, and the attention to detail to do it by the book, it is Germany. -- MeatbombExcept maybe Japan. Oh wait.
Our civilisation is made of cowards and it deserves to fall. All of you, that condemn nuclear, but stop talking before suggesting an alternative that is realistic in both time and scale... All of you, hanging in front of the computers that science has provided you, and running away from science and reality at the first sign of trouble... All of you that are too weak to think clearly and worry more about posturing... All of you are the cancer that will in the end eat us all.What the hell is this crap? "Science" isn't a single thing with a single desire. There are and have been lots of scientist who were opposed to nuclear power.
delmoi, the nukes are not being replaced by solar. They are being replaced by burning fossil fuels. Why don't you run the numbers of the deaths and desease caused by fossil fuels?First of all, you say nukes are not being replaced by solar. Why not? People always just assert that wind and solar are untenable, but they never back that up with anything. Global energy use is about 15 terawatts. this website is selling panels for $1.50/watt. Assuming 5 hours of sunlight equivalent per day that's the equivalent of $7.2 full time, or $108 trillion, or about twice global GDP.
CONSERVATION. Why does it never seriously enter into these discussions?Because building new plants is a lot more doable than changing the habits of an entire nation.
While we're fantasizing about nuclear power, and forgetting about reality, we also can imagine safe ways of storing nuclear waste. The reality once again is that there is currently no way to safely dispose of spent fuel. Maybe Finland has a plan for that, but that's about it.Define 'safe'.
First of all, how is that hand-waving? As you can see from this map the average insolation is clearly about 5 hours per day in the U.S (kWh/m2/day simplifies to h/d). Maybe it's a little lower in Europe, but that's why you have a power distribution grid. And rather then just say "that's hand waving" why not come up with your own actual numbers? You don't even bother to say "you only get X hours of insolation" instead you just say "way less". But there are actual numbers you can use, and you can do actual math and get actual answers about how difficult or hard the problem is.Assuming 5 hours of sunlight equivalent per day....Sans install costsYeah, it's that kind of handwaving that I find unrealistic.
In northern europe you don't even come close to that amount of average equivalent sunlight over the year.
I keep wondering if nuclear opponents just haven't heard about thorium or if they have bad memories. What's a catchy name for "nuclear reactor that can't melt down as long as you remember to turn off the neutron beam on the way out?" Or maybe "old scary nuclear waste burning reactor?"The fukushima reactors weren't critical. Once the moderators were removed, the reaction would shut down. The problem was the breakdown of the fission byproducts producing heat. The "Can't melt down" thing was definitely said of the fukushima style reactors.
TEPCO has reported that information obtained after calibration of the reactor water level gauges of Unit 1 shows that the actual water level in the Unit 1 reactor pressure vessel was lower than was indicated, showing that the fuel was completely uncovered. The results of provisional analysis show that fuel pellets melted and fell to the bottom of reactor pressure vessel at a relatively early stage in the accident.
Are you sure about that delmoi? I had not heard that mentioned before.I'd heard all the time that 'modern' reactors couldn't melt down because if there was a failure, the control rods would be removed on their own and without the control rods, there would be no reaction. And that's exactly what happened at Fukushima. The control rods were removed, and the reaction stopped.
Uranium-233 is produced by the neutron irradiation of thorium-232. When thorium-232 absorbs a neutron, it becomes thorium-233, which has a half-life of only 22 minutes. Thorium-233 decays into protactinium-233 through beta decay. Protactinium-233 has a half-life of 27 days and beta decays into uranium-233; some proposed molten salt reactor designs attempt to physically isolate the protactinium from further neutron capture before beta decay can occur.So from what I can tell, the energy actually comes from fission of U233 which is on the Neptunium Series and has a bunch of byproducts of various half lives. So I would imagine that the rods would still emit radiation, and heat for a while after use, just like rods with Uranium in them.
We need nuclear in the short term. It's the only low carbon source we gave capable of carrying the current base load. We have to dramatically reduce the amount of CO2 we emit.Uh, why? I mean, do you have any kind of numerical analysis to back this up? Because again and again people make the claim without even bothering to try to prove it. I mean, can you even show that Nuclear is even less expensive then wind and solar?
Have to.
I''m a huge proponent of wind power. But there's nothing we can do right now, without major technolgoy advances or infrastructure projects, that will cut into fossil fuel consumption as much as building new nuclear plants.Yeah... I never said it could be done without major infrastructure projects. In fact, that's kind of the whole point. The question is whether or not the infrastructure projects are feasible. Secondly, the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant was one of the most powerful plants out there.
Ha yeah, you're probably right delmoi. I see no evidence that nuclear engineers can add numbers either.Maybe nuclear engineers, but specifically I mean people who say wind/solar are somehow 'impossible' while nuclear power somehow isn't. They never back up their opinion with any kind of numerical evidence, they just say it's impossible without any kind of explanation as to why.
As for the costs of nuclear? Well, france has some 80% of their generation through nuclear. I presume they did their sums. They're also already building some of the newer designs, such as the EPR, two of which are being built in france, a third in finland and two more in china. The EPR in finland was due to be 3.7 billion euro, with an overrun of 2.7 b euro, so 6.4 billion euro to build, for 1600 MW generated in normal use (note, that's not peak.)So, unless I'm reading something wrong, you're estimating €6.4 billion for 1.6 gigawats of nuclear, and €6.7 billion for 1.6 gigawatts of solar. Right? That's only a 4% difference. It's true that you're not including the installation cost, but you're also not including the decommissioning cost which can be huge and really unpredictable as well.
So taking solar, at 1$ per watt for manufactured panels - a reasonably generous figure for current subsidised small scale production. We'll also say, 4 hours day equivalent over the whole year, which is really fucking generous in northern europe (see above). So for 1600 MW, you need 9600 MW of generation to tide you over the other 20 hours in a day. So at 9600 million dollars in euro, that's 6700 million, or 6.7 billion euro just for the panels at cost, and assuming 100% efficient storage for free.
In 2011: $7.5 billion, €5.0b, or 21% cheaperSo, by 2014 an a solar project equivalent in cost to that nuke plant would come in at just a bit more then half the cost of the nuke plant. And there's no reason to think prices might not continue to decline. In the 1970s solar panels cost about $20/watt.
In 2014: $5.0 billion, €3.5b, or 45% cheaper
1) The costs for solar panels are going to be much, much more predictable then the costs for nuke plants. You can have a lot more certainty about how much it's going to cost.So the fact of the mater is solar power may be more practical then nuclear power.
2) Obviously, solar installs are going to be much, much easier to sell politically then nuclear plants.
Sigh. Read more carefully. You're forgetting about capacity factor (why does everyone forgets capacity factor). For the same amount of installed capacity, Nuclear generates 3-10x more power in a year. So take that 6.7 billion (or take your power bill) and multiply it by 3 to 10.Actually, you're the one who needs to read more carefully, because I'm not. The comparison was 1600 Gigawatts of nuclear compared to 9600 gigawatts of solar at peak capacity, and with an estimated 4 hours per day equivalent of sunlight. In other words, the figures for solar were already multiplied by six
Do they get a lot of magnitude 7.0 earthquakes in Germany?--
On 18 February 1756, at about 8 am, one of the strongest earthquakes in Central Europe, the strongest reported in Germany to date, struck Düren.[6][2] The hypocentre is judged to have been at 14–16 km.[7] It followed the 1755 Lisbon earthquake by several months and was the culmination of a series of quakes in Germany that had lasted several years. ... the quake was assessed at VIII on the Mercalli intensity scale,[8] and is today thought to have been approximately 6.1[2] or 6.4[8] on the Richter scale.The Japan quake was magnitude 9.0, btw.
Or will you be totally shocked when it comes to light that solar cell manufacturers have been bankrolling civil wars in Africa to make sure their access to rare earth metals remains available and cheap?Traditional solar panels don't require any exotic chemicals. Just Silicon with traces of Boron and phosphorus. The ones first solar makes do use more exotic materials (cadmium telluride)
Yes, you're missing the entire last part of my comment. I estimated 9600 MW of solar needed because with an average of 4 hours per day, you actually need to generate 6 times as much power in thouse 4 hours to supply the same power for the remaining 20 hours of the day; 24/4 = 6. So that does not take account of capacity factor.Okay, what on earth are you talking about here? Are you claiming that to produce 1600 megawatts of power, you would need to buy 38,400 megawatts of solar panels? Because that's clearly incorrect.
But I cheated, you say! solar power in summer will generate more than that! OK, let's treat that as capacity factor. In summer, the solar plant will generate 8 times as much available power, as it's generating for 4 hours a day, not 0.5 hours.Dude, what on earth are you talking about? The capacity factor is a number between 0 and 1 (or 0% and 100%). Assuming 4 hours/day of sunlight on average that's 0.16, which is on the low end. Nukes have a capacity factor of 0.91 according to wikipedia. So this math is wrong. and you seem to have no idea what a capacity factor is.
So it has a capacity factor of 8, in june, and 0 in december.
Nuke has 3-10 capacity factor all year round depending upon how hard you push it.
That's $2000-4000 per KW, so we'll take $2000 per kilowatt. We need to store 76800 MW minus the 1600W that's given straight to the grid when it's sunny, and accounting for 75% efficiency, that's just over 100 000 MW, so I make that at 2 million dollars a MW for storage, $200 billon, or 140 billion euro. But wait. That only handles a single day's load. Let's say we want to store 3 days worth of power to cover a bad week, that's 420 billion euro.This is totally insane. If this cost is $2000 per KW, then the cost is $2,000,000 per MW and $2 billion per GW. So the cost of a pumped storage for 1.6 gigawatts would be 3.2 billion dollars. again, your sum is off by a factor of over 100 Seriously, how can you screw up the math this badly? It's just bizarre.
18 square miles. Which, well, is rather less than the amount of terrain left uninhabitable by the Fukushima disaster.1,092 square miles.
I'm not the one screwing up the figures. You don't need to store 1.6GW. You need to store 88GW (-1.6GW for half an hour) - remember all that power we're generating from those 76GW of panels that goes away once the sun goes away? You have to put it somewhere, if you want to use it the rest of the day when you're no longer generating. And since pumped storage is only 75% efficient, to get 88GW back for the rest of day when your plant is no longer generating in the winter, you need to have 114 GW of actual storage of which you'll only get 88 GW back. And you need that 88GW, spread through the rest of the day, to provide that 1.6GW average for 24 hours a day. And 100GW of storage*2 million a MW, well, that's $200 billion. And that's the storage for one day.This math is so bizzare I don't even know where to begin. You're just spewing out totally random hours and you're not multiplying them in a way that makes sense at all. One huge problem is that you are talking about storing watts, which makes no sense at all. You store energy not power The $2000 per KW is a measure of how much power the pumped solar system can output, not how much it can store.
Or are you actually arguing that a solar plant that generates 1.6GW for 4 hours a day in summer, and 0.5 hours in winter is the functional equivalent of a nuke plant that generates 1.6GW 24/7/365? Because that's what *I* consider shoddy maths.See, this is totally wrong. You put 76 gigawatts of power solar panels on this thing. So it would generate the equivalent 76 gigawatts of power for 4 hours during the day in the summer and (assuming your insolation figures) 76 gigawatts for 0.5 hours during the winter time that means, over the course of a day would be able to generate 19 gigawatts during the sumer, and 1.6 gigawatts during the winter
So over a 24 hour period, a 1.6GW nuke plant will deliver 1.6GJ per second for the whole period. So 3600x24x1.6GJ makes 138240 GJ delivered in that day.
A 1.6GW solar plant, operating at full capacity for 0.5 hours a day, gives you 3600x0.5x1.6GJ which is 2880 GJ.
Now the cost of the pumped storage. That's $2000-4000 per KW, so we'll take $2000 per kilowatt. We need to store 76800 MW minus the 1600W that's given straight to the grid when it's sunny, and accounting for 75% efficiency, that's just over 100 000 MW, so I make that at 2 million dollars a MW for storage, $200 billon, or 140 billion euro. But wait. That only handles a single day's load. Let's say we want to store 3 days worth of power to cover a bad week, that's 420 billion euroThen you made another version of the same mistake in another comment:
You need to store 88GW (-1.6GW for half an hour) - remember all that power we're generating from those 76GW of panels that goes away once the sun goes away? You have to put it somewhere, if you want to use it the rest of the day when you're no longer generating. And since pumped storage is only 75% efficient, to get 88GW back for the rest of day when your plant is no longer generating in the winter, you need to have 114 GW of actual storage of which you'll only get 88 GW back. And you need that 88GW, spread through the rest of the day, to provide that 1.6GW average for 24 hours a day. And 100GW of storage*2 million a MW, well, that's $200 billion. And that's the storage for one day.So first of all it was 420 billion euros, and then it was $200 billion dollars. these pumped storage costs make up the bulk of your cost estimate, and they are totally nonsensical
You challenged someone to run the numbers of how much a solar plant would cost to build over a nuke plant. At 76 GW needed in winter in london, it's 38 billion dollars of panels that don't even exist yet, with a plant that needs no construction, concrete, steel, land or copper wire for it's 150 sq kilometer size. It needs no storage, it's 100% efficient to convert low voltage DC to HVAC for the grid, free to build, and it still costs 10 times that of a nuke plant that doesn't have cost over-run.Holy fuck dude. First of all, you initially specified building a solar panel with a 4 hours per day insolation, requiring 9600 GW of panels. The math for that works just fine on an annual basis if you put it somewhere sensible instead of the U.K. That was way back early in the thread. Then later you came up with other figures and locations and were spouting all kinds of stuff.
To put ArkhanJG's numbers in perspective: for a solar PV power plant in the UK being capable of generating on average the same amount of energy in the winter as a single 1.6 GW nuclear power plant, its installed capacity would need to be larger than the top 5 power stations in the world combined.First of all that's a power plant capable of generating the same amount of power as a nuclear power plant at night on winter solstice in London. Not over the full year. If such a plant were built it would certainly be enormous 73TWh of energy, or nearly $12 billion worth (given an energy cost of 0.1 pounds /kWh). So even if it did cost $100 to build, it would still be able to pay for itself in less then 10 years.
you demand a comparison between a solar plant and a nuclear plant be based on the energy produced winter solstice only, rather then the whole yearThis was your premise:
Beyond that, running the actual numbers on wind and solar shows it's more then capable of dealing with our power needs. It's only random people who insist on saying it's not possible who never bother to back up their claims."Dealing with our power needs" means providing power where it's needed, all year round. That's why ArkhanJG used England in January as a measure. If you can't cover that case with Solar, what would you use instead? (hint: most grids use natural gas backup plants, the cost of which we're ignoring.)
2) Here's the bigger problem though you are using totally incoherent math to calculate the cost of pumped storage. There seems to be no understanding of the difference between energy and power in these numbers, and they make no sense at all. The cost for 1.6GW of pumped storage is $3.2 billion. You may even be able to fill up the lake in the summer in preparation for the winter if you want too, the cost is measured in power capacity, not storage cost.The cost listed on Wikipedia is certainly listed by power capacity, but that doesn't mean there isn't a cost for more energy capacity. Lets run some new numbers:
3) All this talk about transmission costs is irrelevant, because they apply to nuclear power plants as well as solar plants. Building a nuke plant won't make power lines more efficient.This is handwaving. Nuclear and coal plants are built as close to the load as possible, so the transmission losses are minimized. You are proposing moving power across thousands of kilometers. To do that without losing most of the power to transmission losses we would have to build HVDC links from the PV installations to the Pumped storage installations and to each load center. That's a massive capital outlay.
4) You completely discount the ability to move power from somewhere with a more favorable solar climate, like France or Spain for no reason. Whether it's a high capacity line or through the grid, it should be fine.
"Dealing with our power needs" means providing power where it's needed, all year round. That's why ArkhanJG used England in January as a measure. If you can't cover that case with Solar, what would you use instead? (hint: most grids use natural gas backup plants, the cost of which we're ignoring.)Which is why you use powerlines to get it where it needs to go. You don't HAVE to put a solar plant in London in order to get electricity to London, it's completely ridiculous to make that a requirement the UK and France are both members of the EU.
Nuclear and coal plants are built as close to the load as possibleThat may be true for older nuclear plants, but I will bet you anything that new ones will be built waaaaay out in the middle of nowhere. They are not going to be built near population centers, at all.
but the minimum monthly average (in December / January) is 2-3 hours/day (in the South. It's less than 2 in the North). So lets say the average daily insolation is a straight line from 2.5 hours a day (a capacity factor of 0.1) at the winter solstice to 7.5 hours a day at the summer solstice (a capacity factor of 0.3) and back again.This is kind of true but not really. It's based on a flat panel sitting on the ground. Ultimately that's how much sun you would get per unit of land not necessarily per meter of solar panel. What's cool about that site is that it lets you calculate insolation for various configurations. so if you go to the page and select January for the month and "horizontal flat plate" you get 0-2 h/day for most of the country and 2-3 for most of the rest.
I harp on this because I can't stand people who say *the man* is keeping us attached to nuclear and fossil power. There's no *man*, there's just dollars.Which is why I think the solution is a cap and trade system, and people will price energy based on how much it actually costs, rather then how much it costs if you allow people to just dump byproducts into the atmosphere. If it's the case that energy in the middle of the night is expensive due to carbon caps, people will invest CFL bulbs and other power saving devices at night. People will invest in pumped storage systems or flywheels or whatever in order to make money selling power at night, based on whether or not the economics works out.
Except we're not charging it at 1.6GW for 24 hours, and then getting 1.6GW back for the following 24. You're charging it at 76GW for half an hour.Uh, no this is completely wrong. The plant generates 38GWh over the entire time the sun is up. That's the equivalent of running at 76GW for a half hour, in terms of the energy produced, but not in terms of the actual amount of power at any given moment (and btw, even in the middle of winter some days it will generate more, other days less, depending on the weather. 38GWh is just the average). Even on January 1st, you the day is 8 hours long. It's just that the sun is low on the horizon, so that you don't get much actual sunlight on the ground (this can actually be fixed by changing the angle of the panels, by the way - you just have to space them far enough apart so they don't cast shadows on eachother, but that's beside the point at this point)
I'm glad you agree with the 76.8GW of solar DC needed to be equivalent over 24 hours, if the plant and conversion to HVAC is 100% efficient. Now we're getting somewhere! Given that's the figure I came up with for 0.5 hours isolation originally, I'm glad you accept that part of my maths isn't actually completely fucked up, but is in fact, entirely correct.The screwed up math was dealing with the pumped storage cost, which you were claiming was going to be $420 billion dollars or something. The 76GW of solar panels is right, but only if you are trying to build a solar plant that is capable of producing as much energy in London, in the middle of winter as the nuke plant.
1) you assume a 76GW plant is needed to compete with nuclear. This ignores the fact that power use is actually less at night. It ignores the possibility of simply putting it up and using transmission.Now,
I did go through some of the math about a hypothetical 76GW, but I should probably have just pointed out that it was a silly comparison for comparing solar and nukes world wide.
2)You screwed up the math on pumped storage by a huge amount in earlier comments mainly by confusing power and energy. Throwing out a bunch of nonsense math in the middle of an argument makes it difficult to keep going.
3) And special in your last comment: you assumed that the equivalent of peak capacity for a half an hour actually meant running for only a half an hour, rather then a half an hours worth of sunlight spread out over the entire day.
However, storing energy for 6 months, by pumping it in in summer and drawing it out in winter... Well, you'd need smaller pumps, yes, because you can charge it for 4 hours a day. But you're going to need a really big fucking lake to store enough energy to delivery 1.6GW for 6 months. 138240 GJ per day, for 182 days... that's over 25 million GJ. That's quite a lot of water.So what? Why would anyone ever do that? What does that have to do with anything? All you would have to do is build the plant in a sensible location like France or Spain, where you still get plenty of sunlight in the winter. Whether or not you can have a pumped storage lake that stores 6 months of power is completely irrelevant as far as the practicality of replacing solar power with nuclear power.
Which is why you use powerlines to get it where it needs to go. You don't HAVE to put a solar plant in London in order to get electricity to LondonAbsolutely right. But the infrastructure needed to carry such a huge amount of power over such long distances with little loss adds to the capital cost of the solar plant.
So the bottom line is that if you use a tracking panels, you can get a good 4 hours of equivalent peak insolation or more in the U.S. Not a half hour (and in fact I would be that a tracking panel could get at least 1.6h in the UK as well).Also true. But that tracking panel will cost you more than the stationary one again.
So if you were going to use a nuke plant alone, it would need to have peak capacity close to it's average capacity (or you would need pumped water storage at night). On the other hand with solar you have your peak output when you have your peak consumption. and then NO capacity at night. But, if you only need night time capacity from coal and oil, that's still a huge improvement over the current situation. We don't need CO2 to go zero right away, just be reduced by a lot.Our exercise was to see whether it was possible to replace a nuclear plant with solar. If you need coal and oil for night time capacity you would be increasing CO2 emissions relative to a nuclear plant. Earlier, someone mentioned that supporting Solar Power is akin to supporting coal. This is what they mean right here.
Anyway, you gave some figures but you didn't reach any conclusion about how much a solar plant would actually cost compared to a nuclear plant. So how can you say nuclear costs less then solar?Trying to show the cost calculations here seems to be a bit of a lost cause. Instead, I will cite some recent cost experience:
Absolutely right. But the infrastructure needed to carry such a huge amount of power over such long distances with little loss adds to the capital cost of the solar plant.So does the decommissioning costs of nuclear, as well as the costs of actually running the thing which nuke proponents are ignoring. At a certain point, you just have to use numbers.
Also true. But that tracking panel will cost you more than the stationary one again.Maybe. But the conversation kind of derailed by talking about this 76GW plant. I agree putting a plant in London is not going to be as practical as putting a nuclear plant there, but I guarantee you that politically, putting a Nuke plant there won't happen politically. Keep in mind Fukushima was built to supply power to Tokyo and it was hundreds of km away
Earlier, someone mentioned that supporting Solar Power is akin to supporting coal. This is what they mean right here.
You can not shut down a coal fired plant for a few hours every night.If electricity at night is more expensive then electricity during the day, and coal plants are expensive to run due to a requirement to buy carbon credits, then people will definitely figure it out. Natural gas is also a possibility.
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As an anti-nuclearist i'm just happy.
posted by - at 12:57 AM on May 30, 2011 [4 favorites]