Solar: The absolute maximum upper limit is 1.3kW/m^2, the total solar energy hitting the Earth's disc. Realistically, you'll max out around 130W/m^2 under ideal conditions, dealing with atmospheric absorption, night, clouds, conversion efficiency, breakage, etc. Realistic norm is somewhere around even a tenth of that. Output storage & buffering is problematic, batteries using environmentally unfriendly materials requiring manufacture & replacement over a less-than-you-want lifespan. By the time an installation has become cost-effective, it's done and you'll have to re-install diminishing-return components. On a large enough scale to compete with other energy sources, you're performing "solar strip-mining" on the local environment.
Wind: Big turbines are costly, last about 20 years, annoy neighbors (I almost had a wind farm dropped on my town), and by the time those huge expensive generators wear out or burn up (!) nobody will have a financial interest in replacing/dismantling them. Likewise, inconsistent power output is a problem few seriously address. Converting large amounts of atmospheric movement to heat will itself result in "manmade global warming" type issues.
Old-form nuclear sucks. Between lousy ancient designs and sheer paranoia over "weapons-grade" phases, coupled with vast construction handling high-pressure extreme-danger contents, yeah there's a disaster waiting to happen - and as noted it just takes one to make the savings moot.
New-form nuclear has real potential. Small sealed units incapable of self-destructing, highly resistant to deliberate damage, and easy to transport make it entirely possible for a community to purchase one turnkey reactor and run from that for decades.
Oil/coal will remain a major contender precisely because the energy has already been gathered into convenient pumpable-haulable form, is shelf-stable over usage fluctuations, and has little discernible waste.
Renewables are just not viable, at least not yet. Despite huge piles of money thrown at it (by the current US administration in particular), nothing of marketable substance has emerged. If it were viable, it would be in widespread production. I'm looking to run my HVAC off solar if you disagree.
The bashing of nuclear is mostly limited to old-school hot-water active-cooling designs. Yes, they suck. Get over it and move on to modern designs held back mostly by regulatory concerns which apply those fears to inapplicable reactors without further consideration.
The question is: is it better to spend billions researching new generations of nuclear reactors or to spend billions working on energy storage?
The former will lead to a switch from older, less concentrated fossil fuels to a newer, more energy-dense fossil fuel. But it's not without well-known problems.
The latter will result in a permanent, eternal solution to the energy problem.
There are limits to how much solar and wind is available, but those are orders of magnitude beyond our civilization's current energy requirements. Other limits to growth -- arable land, decreasing fertility with increasing wealth -- will likely prevent us from ever even approaching those limits.
Solve the energy storage problem and the industrial revolution becomes as permanent as the agricultural revolution. Nuclear power won't do that. So energy storage technology is IMHO a more prudent, higher dividend investment than better nuclear reactors.
Show me any form of serious progress on the energy storage problem, please. Tesla's $40,000 car battery is about the best there is, and that's not encouraging.
In addition for evening out dips and bumps in unreliable renewable energy, it's a good option for excess using excess capacity in nuclear power plants in order to deal with load variation. (Nuclear reactors don't like changing their energy production levels, so evening out the load on them by buffering with pumped water energy storage is a great benefit).
Flywheels are also another option, although I don't think they're nearly as popular.
Overall, purely mechanical solutions seem to be preferred over chemical energy storage for large installations.
Flywheel storage is OK for spinning reserve (responding to fluctuations on the order of an hour or two) but is too expensive otherwise.
My money is on thermal storage, and cheap-substrate batteries (molten salt, liquid metal) for longer-scale storage. For national scale grid storage there are many alternatives for which there's simply not sufficient material to create a feasible alternative.
I haven't really heard of solar based "atmospheric disruption" issue. On the other hand, I have wondered what the effect of releasing gigawatts (terawatts?) of heat (and electricity that will become heat) derived from nuclear power plants year after year. Solar is a closed system energy source; we're going to receive that energy one way or another whereas nuclear is adding energy to the system derived by converting matter - energy that isn't a normal input.
If cities at large become net exporters of electricity it would in some small part alleviate heat bubbles.
If the panels are next the the city, you do concentrate heat more in the city as electric is delivered, but no more than electric supplied and consumed from non solar sources. If the panels are adjacent to the city, you again alleviate the heat bubble to some small extent because you're cooling one area and increasing the thermal gradient between the hot city and cooler solar panel farm.
I don't know how one would conclude that any of these effects are of a magnitude to "wreck the local ecosystem".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_energy_storage
The other solution is large-scale intelligent power grids. The wind always blow somewhere and the sun always shines somewhere. The amount of grid-scale storage backing required for uninterrupted power is probably less than 12 hours. I'm sure someone has done a solid analysis on this.
Sure, but then your power supply is in the hands of other countries. What happens during war?
No different from wars over water supply.
This single statement clearly indicates you have absolutely no clue whatsoever about anything regarding energy production. At all. It's like saying that you can't have an LED display on a space rocket because running it would use up all the fuel. Except, that doesn't even capture the scale of the energy disconnect. I can't actually think of an analogy that accurately demonstrates the level of sheer ignorance in that comment...
Calculate a relevant upper limit: if ALL current human energy needs were provided via wind power, how many modern full-sized turbines would be required? what would the atmospheric impact be, if any? at what point does that impact transition from scathingly negligible to "OMG we're destroying the Earth"? Compare said impact to that of fossil fuels a la "global warming" (a concept which itself would have been derided as "having absolutely no clue whatsoever about anything regarding energy production" just a few decades ago). Don't insult, quantify. I'm not looking for encyclopedic completeness, just a back-of-envelope ballpark akin to "the absolute upper limit for solar power is 1.3kW/m^2, realistic capture about 1% thereof".
Pardon me if I didn't perfectly articulate one of several points to authoritative completeness in a brief blog post.
And while we're at it, given robust suitable LEDs, how many homes could be lit for one year from the fuel consumed in one rocket launch? You might be onto something.
Ok. World energy consumption is about 15 Terawatts.
Solar energy incoming is about 174,000 Terawatts.
Therefore, the percentage increase in energy output if we took all....actually, I'm sure you can work the rest out for yourself.
If you're going to pounce on one sentence (and imply that somehow it should have been thorough when it was just one sentence), then yes I'd like you to back up your broad-brush insults with some figures (nothing difficult, just sensible ballpark framing).
OK, for all your attack verbiage we get one salient point: human energy use amounts to 0.01% of all Earth's incoming solar energy. So back to my concern: where is the tipping point at which shifting all our energy use to "renewables" starts adversely affecting the environment? "Manmade-CO2 based global warming" was laughable, now it's practically a religious doctrine. "Solar strip-mining" kills everything living under those panels, taking most of the light & heat. Hydropower wrecks wetlands by turning shallow warm muddy water (which life therein has enjoyed for darn near ever) into deep cold clear basins. Wind farms have their issues, but lack of sheer scale obscures them, and methinks we are ignorant of what effects vast fields of turbines would have (just as we dismissed the effects of other energy sources listed).
Blowing it all off as "worrying about an LED's effect on a rocket launch" is historically naive. Manmade CO2 is really just a minuscule percentage of total CO2, yet there's a vast movement to severely curtail human activity in fear of its accumulation forcing a "tipping point" toward global disaster. I'm not convinced that solar panels & wind turbines don't, on a comparably large scale, risk similar consequences.
Yes, you can stop there. You are confused.
> "Manmade-CO2 based global warming" was laughable,
No, it wasn't. No-one thought you could increase CO2 levels by 70% and not cause an effect. How would the extra energy be removed? Magic?
And you're now trying to talk multiple points at once so that you can confuse the issue rather than clarify it. That's why I picked on one point. I wanted to see if you would admit it was wrong.
The main problem is that even if you do nothing, after a while the air in the wind stop dew to the friction and all the kinetic energy is transformed into thermal energy. So using a windmill and connecting it to heater is global warming neutral, but stupid. Connecting the windmill to an engine is much more useful, and after a while all the movement will get transformed into heat, but the process is still is global warming neutral. If you connect the windmill to a laser, and point it to the space it's possible to remove some energy from the Earth and make it cooler, but the effect would be still totally absolutely completely negligible.
Researched as a rocket engine (but equally effective for terrestrial power) over 40 years ago. Instead of taking 20,000 kg of fuel (which is about how much each Fukushima reactor had) and trying to prevent it from overheating, the nuclear lightbulb reactor (or rocket engine) takes 20kg of fuel, compresses, and heats the fuel to the point where it is a self sustaining critical reaction. If the chamber ruptures or power is cut, the core (which at this point is about 10,000 Kelvin and a black body radiator in UV-vis) expands, cools, and reacts with oxygen to quickly precipitate. If you combine this with a plasma window separated vacuum chamber with graphite or another neutron moderator, the second power is cut the entire chamber including the nuclear core is sucked into a safety chamber (plasma windows require multiple kilowatts of power per inch diameter so any failure causes it to die). Of course there are some material science problems to go over but with the progress we (Corning alone, really) made in the last 40 years, it is achievable.
Food for thought: the worst power-generation related disaster was by far Deep Water Horizon, which is turning the entire Gulf of Mexico into a deadzone (you could even see the oil from space! [1]). Hell, BP's fuck up wasn't even the worst case scenario (earthquake or something causing the entire subterranean pipe to expand past the point of closing with conventional cement) and we will be dealing with the aftermath for many decades.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spil...
And you take this as evidence against nuclear power? Not only that, you consider this so obvious that the debate is pretty much closed. I'm just baffled.
The Japanese now have a 20-year radiation-spewing money pit, which was avoidable.
My post was mostly about the future. Why build more potential multi-billion-dollar 20-year money pits when there are alternatives that are almost ready and that could be brought to readiness with what are likely comparable R&D expenditures and infrastructure costs?
Yes, obviously the cost of these ultra-rare events needs to be accounted for in doing a cost-benefit analysis. But the billions of dollars it will cost to clean up Fukishima (which, again, are mostly unnecessary) is tiny compared to the total cost of nuclear power, or any power source, on a global scale. There are ~500 nuclear plants worldwide, each costing ~$5 billion each. This singular event is just plain not important.
The fact that it's "avoidable" is only useful on the scale of improving particular reactors or particular regulatory agencies. With regard to choosing sources of power, it really doesn't matter except to make nuclear more attractive. (If some nuclear power risks are avoidable, and therefore improvable, in a way that the costs of renewables cannot be improved, this is a point in nuclear's favor.)
The question of which types of power society should invest in is a complex one, requiring the careful weighing of various risks, technological uncertainties, and ethical questions. I certainly don't know the answer. But what I do know is that the pittance of money lost in this disaster does not play an appreciable role in that calculation, except insofar as it gives ammunition for some people to fearmonger.
@SuperChihuahua: I can't find the articles now, but just one failure case is there were pools with spent nuclear rods in them that required active cooling. Failure to do so produces a plume of radiation straight into the air. Of course you're never supposed to store that many fuel rods, yet somehow safety wasn't important and there we where with tons of fuel rods in pools that required active cooling and no real plan for what to do if, say, we couldn't actively cool them.
(I don't agree with that argument though; we're going to have to figure safe nuclear out, because we can't keep dumping pollutants into the atmosphere).
PS: Granted those are both vary unlikely, but if you want to talk worst case it can get really bad especially when you add in say a large earthquake on an unknown fault or a meter impact etc.
And yet, compared to any other design still in use, it had virtually no containment. It had a concrete and steel lid for primary containment, but it's secondary containment was a corrugated tin roof, instead of the typical reinforced concrete that can take a jet impact (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25vlt7swhCM). On top of that, they disabled the safety systems deliberately because the reactor would normally not have allowed itself to be placed in the extremely unstable state that caused the disaster.
The Chernobyl accident can be compared to taking a car, replacing the crumple zones and roll cage with tin foil, cutting the brake lines, and then driving full speed into a wall in order to test the safety systems. Without using a crash test dummy. And then wondering why someone got hurt.
When people can do something as monumentally stupid and poorly engineered as Chernobyl and still keep most of the radioactive material contained, that really says something.
Modern reactors are designed so that they will be passively safe. Even if the safety systems get shut down and the reactor core turns into a radioactive puddle of metal, it shouldn't be able to lose containment.
No one argues that solar or wind will kill anyone.
And, the real problem with nuclear is that it isn't cost effective. If the free market was operating, no plants nuclear plants would be built in the US. It is only with govt. subsidies making 90% the up-front cost risk-free there has been even a nibble of interest from free market investors. And even that interest has petered out.
For renewable base load, your options are basically hydro or burning something renewable like ((farmed) wood, trash, or methane from trash). Otherwise, with current technology, you are left with either burning atoms or burning something made of dinosaurs that you claw from the earth.
Solar and Wind might be able to do some limited base-load with massive efficient energy storage schemes, such as pumped-storage hydro, but really I don't see that scaling very far. PSH is about as good as it gets for that, and it is highly dependent on local geography.. Other schemes like storing molten sodium or compressed air don't really operate in the same class as PSH.
No one in the US is building new coal because natural gas is super cheap these days. Market conditions can change, though.
Plus, China.
only in the current environment there most of the cost of coal energy (green house gas and other pollutants emissions, environment destruction where coal is mined, etc...) is socialized
The price of a new coal plant in the US has gone up dramatically due to the increases in energy and metals.
All energy sources other than fossil fuels are the product of huge government R&D investments and huge subsidies.
1. False alternative. There are multiple alternatives to nuclear power, and I'm not aware that there are higher levels of death associated with most of them, coal being the notable exception.
2. The risk profile of nuclear power is not well-understood. Humans have hundreds to tens of thousands of years of experience with fire, water, and wind power. We've been toying with atoms for about three-quarters of a century, with commercial electrical generation for only about half of that. In that time large areas of land have been contaminated, and a number of serious plant or reactor accidents have occurred, several of them contaminating large areas of land until at least 2050 (64 years after the accident), possibly longer. The effects of the Fukishima disaster are still being revealed.
3. Few conventional power plants (natural gas plants with significant on-site storage being a potential exception) have catastrophic failure modes with more than a very small affected region. In terms of both longevity of effects and area, acute impacts are limited. By contrast, when things go wrong with a nuke, then tend to go very phenomenally wrong, and it can be unclear, even after a significant period of time, what the full consequences and extent of damage are.
and don't start on how many people cholesterol in burgers is killing
Do you even support coal? Your other comments on this thread suggest otherwise.
Fukushima doesn't represent the state of the art. It didn't even represent the state of the art a quarter of a century ago.
Or, we could extend their operating license each for 20 years and see if they can handle it.
We should definitely be upgrading our nuclear reactors to modern designs. While the USA mostly isn't in an earthquake zone, which reduces the risks, the reactors are definitely past their useful life, less safe than they could be, and require more expensive, dangerous, and weaponizable fuel than then should.
The problem with upgrading, of course, is political. The amount of public outcry that would occur if we started to build new reactors, even based on better designs, would make things very difficult politically.
The awesome power of exponential tipping points is not to be underestimated. When the cost/kWh curves intersect, it could happen fast. Look at the adoption of the Internet and smart phones for examples. Solar could go from <1% of our energy to >25% in 5-10 years. That might be conservative.
I'm seeing nuclear as a niche technology. In a post-fossil world I can see it for radionucleotide production (e.g. for nuclear medicine and space probes), maybe for a few really heavy industrial needs, and for some locations with very poor local renewable energy availability. But for the most part I see it as obsolescent.
I do think it might find its killer app somewhere else though: Mars. There are many reasons it would make more sense there.
Two examples: First, China doubled its life expectancy in a single decade, moving from one of the lowest to being at parity with the developed world. Second, in the early 1980s China implemented policies that moved them from having stagnant GDP per capita to steadily doubling it per decade, a pace it remains on since.
In fact, you could blame some of post revolutionary China's most disasterous events on the lack of bureaucratic inertia. The great leap forward was disasterous not just because the details of the plan were mistaken, but also because it was implemented so instantly and completely.
Anyhow, if you look at the data instead of repeating narratives that personify organizations, you'll see it's not quite so simple as saying that all Chinese economic decision-making can be summarily rejected as lumbering bureaucracy.
Renewables will only get so far if we don't stop increasing our energy demands exponentially every year. Since that seems unlikely, we will produce every single way we can.
You could cover 1/4 of the roof area in the US with solar panels and have enough power to close all other power plants. Add panels over parking lots and you get exponential demand back.
Here's what he wrote about Toshiba [0], ~ 2.5 years ago when Fukushima lit up:
But the new plants also have to show they can survive an 8.9 earthquake and reduce the number of critical failure points. Toshiba's 4S reactors, which have been around for several years now, though not yet commercially successful, do all that quite easily.
4S reactor cores are like nuclear building blocks, built on a factory production line and transported by truck to be installed 30 meters under the ground. Each 4S puts out 10 megawatts of electricity or enough for 2000 Japanese homes. Following this path means the lost 1000 megawatt reactors will need 100 4S's each to replace them or a total of 1200 4S reactors. 4S's are fueled at the factory, put in place to run for 20 years then returned to the factory for refueling. They are sodium-cooled and pretty darned impossible to melt down. If the cooling system is compromised they automatically shut down and just sit there in a block of sodium.
I admit I haven't followed the Toshiba 4S model's progress in the intervening time, but was fascinated at the idea when I read about it before. Cringely isn't a nuclear engineer, but he's no slouch, either. It's all worth a read.
----------
[0] http://www.cringely.com/2011/03/13/is-anything-nuclear-ever-...
... and here's more of RXC's writing on the topic. Fascinating stuff:
http://www.cringely.com/2011/03/11/flea-powder-may-be-saving...
http://www.cringely.com/2011/03/16/who-ya-gonna-call-superta...
http://www.cringely.com/2011/03/30/plutonium-is-forever/
http://www.cringely.com/2011/09/20/truth-about-fukushima-dai...
http://www.cringely.com/2012/05/24/the-next-japanese-nuclear...
Ow. I dropped the solar panel on my foot.
For nuclear:
Oops, we destroyed $270B of real estate.
Oops, we spent $270B on solar panels that can't provide enough power.
The problem is that the diesel generators that were supposed to provide backup power to the cooling systems got swamped, basically making meltdown inevitable with the design of the reactor.
Edit:extraneous words removed
This is why every country with nuclear plants subsidies nuclear energy with laws that limit the amount of compensation.
Do you have a cite for this? My understanding is that the risks from nuclear are simply too high variance (i.e., concentrated in a few huge events) for an insurance company to absorb, not that the expectation value of the cost is high.
This is directly contrary to hannibal5's claim, correct?
I'm afraid this is second hand info, so I offer it for entertainment purposes only!
It was a laughably small amount. I wouldn't expect any other 1st world country to much better.
The anything-but-nuclear policy has caused fossil fuel wars costing hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars.
The parent comment is not merely wrong, it is the opposite of correct. Having a Fukushima-size meltdown every few years would be an economic bargain.
Using a lot of nuclear power would not alter this picture in the slightest. It might alter the landscape in terms of supply and demand, perhaps shifting fossil fuel demand from heavy nuclear users toward developing or lower-tech countries, but the basic equation of high value resources plus political instability remains intact.
California is highly oil-dependent and Texas has a lot of oil. So far California has not invaded Texas. That's because both are politically stable.
Right! Let someone else pour blood and treasure into the sands of the Middle East, while we enjoy a nuclear-electric-hydrogen economy. The goal is our prosperity, not the stability of a bunch of oily camel jockeys.
Not because I buy into all the fear mongering about radiation, but for a much simpler reason: it showed that conventional nuclear is not cost-effective vs. the alternatives and is not scalable.
In any system, accidents will happen. Worst case accidents will happen. The frequency may be low, but Fukushima shows that one singular bad accident can completely obliterate the economic rationale for nuclear power in a given country. Fukushima is going to be a billions-a-year money pit for Japan for at least the next decade and a half.
Given those costs plus the fact that nuclear without accidents is not substantially cheaper than alternatives, it just seems more rational to invest the money and R&D effort required to solve the energy storage and distribution problems associated with solar and wind energy.
In the end, provided we can back them up and distribute the power efficiently, there is actually more energy available from the sun and the wind than there is from any actionable real-world plan for scaling nuclear that I've ever seen. Renewables also have many other benefits including:
- Very low risk... basically no more dangerous than any other construction or manufacturing.
- No fuel, so little to no real sustainability concerns. This means that once we make them work they will work forever and we won't have to worry about energy anymore.
- Small incremental investment cost. Wind and solar can be deployed in small increments, and it's exponentially easier to raise small increments of money than large ones.
- Less politically centralized. Nuclear demands centralized regulation and huge centralized financial control, and nuke plants are central points of failure for the entire industrial system built around them. Were we to rely on them exclusively they would become easy "off switches." Renewables by contrast open up the potential for a "PC revolution" in energy.
It just seems like a no brainer for me. Nuclear is a boondoggle, at least for most uses.